How do we measure and account for sustainability?

In his new book, Matthew Archer takes a behind-the-scenes look at how corporate and financial actors enforce a business-friendly approach to global sustainability, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among a wide range of sustainability professionals around the world.

Join Matthew Archer as he shares his insights at this book launch, hosted by The Centre for Sustainable Business and Dr Pauline Destrée Lecturer in Business Ethics and Sustainability, as part of the Business Ethics and Sustainability (UG second-year course) at King's Business School.

Join us online (Teams) or in person (Bush House, Lecture Hall 1) on Thursday 5th December, 2pm-3.45pm.

This event is open to everyone.

About the book:

In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility.

And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting.

Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you.

Find out more: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123506765-unsustainable