The Rhetoric of Sustainability: Origins and Practices

Abstract

Institutions of all types—whether corporations, nonprofit organizations, or government entities—have increasingly been urged to address issues of sustainability, in order to assure stakeholders that they were being socially responsible. As a result, there has been a significant amount of research devoted to this subject in both academic journals in diverse fields and the popular press, the latter including venues such as Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune. The whole notion of sustainability has come to be seen as a part of corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this issue, we present the first in a series of feature topics devoted to the rhetoric of sustainability, following a call for papers by the Business Practices Committee of the Association for Business Communication (ABC). While some scholars have focused on particular CSR rhetorical strategies—for example, those intended to express moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy (Marais, 2012)—our first article traces the trope of sustainability over the past half century. Sustainability as a linguistic concept appears to continue signifying conservation of natural resources, even as CSR now includes adaptation to social, economic, and political environments. The author argues that these adaptive management practices are largely absent from business and professional communication pedagogy and calls for scholars and practitioners to recognize the discursive evolution of sustainability. Thus, this article sets the stage for others on the rhetoric of sustainability and the attention to historical context provides a roadmap for future studies. Our second article in this feature topic describes an observational case study of a contested environmental preservation project conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The author follows the resource manager for this project and his efforts to construct persuasive messages to community members to motivate their support for preserving a recreational use area, including his own self-reflections on the process and transcribed interviews with community members. Without community buy-in, the area would be closed, and so the resource manger employed the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, credibility, and character development to align the Corps values of sustainability with those of the community whose access was at risk (Aristotle, ca. 367-323 B.C.E./2019). The author’s conclusions suggest insights