‘Clinging Together Against the Dark’: A Pragmatist Reading of Sustainability Conversations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In this paper, we present a typology of managers' interpretations of sustainability as ‘narrative fields’ derived from a qualitative multi‐site study and offer a Pragmatist reading of the results. Pragmatism is grounded in an ethic of meliorism, the belief in the possibility of gradually improving the world through human effort and experimentation. Through a Pragmatist lens we see managers talking the way to better futures: continuously negotiating the big idea of sustainability via their myriad interactions with stakeholders and within their evolving constructions and re‐constructions of the relationships among ecology, society, and economy. We find that the contestable concept of sustainability is most usefully conceived as a field of narratives delineated by broad dimensions (discrete/integrated, actual/possible), with sustainability conversations —those that push toward integration and new possibility—as the primary means to move toward living better futures. We conclude with implications for research and management practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".