Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously: Is the Emergence of "Sustainable" Practices Meaningful?

The title of the presentation comes from a famous passage by Noam Chomsky (Chomsky 1957) showing that sentences that make sense syntactically or structurally may carry no meaning. So one might ask whether the emergence of green practices in firms signals a meaningful sea change or remains merely some familiar, but meaningless pattern. And further, given the spate of books and articles (for example see, (Hart 1997)) that suggest that [only] firms with sustainable strategies will be tomorrow’s winners, one should ask whether the moral or romantic exhortations that usually accompany these texts are sufficient motivators to induce a critical mass of firms to move to sustainable trajectories. Reasons to remain skeptical exist on both accounts.