Chapter 5 takes a deep dive into the history of US agrochemical regulation in order to show that innovative companies were a major force behind the adoption of institutions that required the precautionary reevaluation of existing products, in opposition to generic producers who stood to lose out from such institutions. Using an original dataset that tracks changes to US agrochemical regulations over a two decade period, the chapter then provides evidence that in the wake of these institutions’ implementation, regulations have become stricter on older, less profitable products over time for reasons that cannot be attributed to health, safety, or obsolescence alone. In addition, the chapter provides evidence that the mechanism behind this outcome is not the political power of producers but rather their ability to leverage their information advantages under a regulatory regime in which products are subject to precautionary reevaluations.

In the concluding chapter of the book, we reflect on the future of corporate sustainability. We summarise the key topics covered in each of the four sections – approaches, actors, processes and issues. We present past and future developments for each of these sections. We also reflect on how some of the tensions as presented in the introduction remain and become core to corporate sustainability debates. Finally, we end on a reflection of our personal roles in advancing sustainability.

Along with traditional organisational forms, such as SMEs and MNCs, a variety of alternative types of organising exist in the business world. As hybrid organisations between traditional for-profit businesses and non-profit organisations, alternative types of organising often integrate social and environmental concerns deeply into their business models. Hence, these organisations aim at combining economic goals with the pursuit to proactively create a positive social and environmental impact.

In this chapter, we will take a deeper look into alternative types of organising for corporate sustainability as a promising pathway to integrate sustainability into the business sector and discuss the challenges they face as well as the social and environmental impact they create. Specifically, we will discuss four examples of these organisations: foundation-owned companies, which are companies that are fully or partially owned by an industrial foundation instead of shareholders; cooperatives, which are community-based organisations that are owned by their members (i.e., individuals who voluntarily join their forces and collaborate); social businesses, defined as organisations that pursue a social or environmental mission while engaging in commercial business activities; and B Corps as a specific form of social businesses, meaning those that have applied for and passed a certain certification process.

This chapter discusses the nature, legitimacy, impact and critique of voluntary standards for sustainability. We first develop a definition of sustainability standards and distinguish three different types of standards. This discussion shows that, while standardisation in the field of sustainability has grown in recent years, existing initiatives differ in several important ways. Next, we discuss how the legitimacy of sustainability standards can be assessed. We differentiate between standards’ input and output legitimacy. We then focus on the impact that sustainability standards can potentially have on adopting firms, end consumers and the regulated issue area. The final section takes a detailed look at the critique that has been raised against selected standards (e.g., the coexistence of multiple standards with a similar purpose).

The final empirical chapter turns to the international level in order to determine whether delegation to an international standard-setter alters the regulatory dynamics identified. Looking at the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the chapter asks whether this institution has been able to ameliorate the regulatory biases found domestically. In order to answer this, the chapter replicates the analysis conducted on agrochemical regulation in the United States, this time looking at changes to standards under Codex. The chapter shows that even though Codex standard-setters are substantially more removed from the domestic political process than regulators in the USA, the Codex Commission has shown as much of, if not a greater tendency to systematically impose stricter standards on out-of-patent agrochemical products. As such, the international standard-setter has ended up placing more onerous rules on more affordable products for reasons that are less based on science than they are based on the absence of scientific information. In addition to showing that international standards have been vulnerable to similar biases as domestic regulations, this chapter also explores how developing countries and generic producers have sought to combat the regulatory barriers that have arisen at the international level and how innovative firms have successfully blocked them.

This chapter discusses the role of ethical reflection in the context of corporate sustainability. It starts by reviewing the relevance of four normative ethical theories (utilitarian ethics, duty-based ethics, virtue ethics and posthuman ethics) for corporate sustainability. Next, the chapter discusses how people in organisations make ethical decisions and which cognitive biases impact our decision-making. In the following section, the chapter asks two essential questions: Why do we need ethics when discussing corporate sustainability? and Can corporations engage in ethical reflection or is this something that only individuals can do? The final section discusses how firms can manage ethics, and we distinguish two orientations that can guide such management: compliance and integrity.

In Chapters 3 and 4, I described my sample of eco-conscious households and the priorities, resources, and constraints that influence how they get things done in everyday life. In this chapter and Chapter 6, I will describe how these elements combine to generate a set of human activities in households that constitute everyday life. In trying to learn about how households get things done, I focused my conversations with informants on their practices with respect to six categories of daily life: waste, comfort, cleanliness, food, transportation, childcare, and general provisioning. The discussion in this book focuses on waste, indoor comfort, and cleanliness, since these are aspects of everyday life that have not received extensive attention elsewhere. Because of my interest in how practices change or are resistant to change, I asked follow-up questions to help me understand how my informants learned these practices, how these differ from the way they themselves grew up, how things have changed since becoming a parent, and what they would do differently if they had more time or money. This chapter describes how my informants deal with household solid waste.

Household waste includes trash and “packaging,” compost, recycling, diapers, and toilet waste. The eco-conscious households I spoke with were almost universally concerned with reducing their consumption, and for many, the waste generated by their lifestyles and practices serves as an uncomfortable reminder of their shortcomings in the sustainability realm. For some households, practices that prevented waste from going to a landfill, such as composting and recycling, are sufficient to alleviate the guilt associated with waste-generating consumption. Other households attempt to purchase items with as little packaging as possible because recycling and composting are not enough for them to feel absolved. Waste is visible, tangible evidence of things you consumed. Once every week or two, your neighbors can see all of your trash awaiting removal right in front of your home. It smells, it is unsightly, it attracts vermin, and it triggers disgust through our instinctive drive to avoid risks of contamination, parasites, and disease (Kelly 2011, 1– 58). In this sample of households, the topic of packaging—things like plastic films and cardboard boxes—elicited powerful and unexpected reactions from my informants, while practices that involve allowing organic matter to decompose in the backyard or leaving urine in a toilet bowl unflushed elicited few negative reactions.

In this chapter, I will tell you about the resources available to my informants as they go about getting things done in everyday life, as well as the factors that constrain their ability to get things done and the options available to them.

Households draw upon a variety of resources to get things done in everyday life, but these resources can be simplified to three major overlapping categories: money, time, and know-how. Money is used to buy items the household uses or transforms, pay for assistance, and to pay for education and training. Money is obtained through government assistance, trading an adult's time for wages or self-employment income, and directly (cash) or indirectly (gifts) from extended family members. Time is used to transform purchased inputs into usable final-use goods and services, to locate free or cheaper items, to obtain money through waged work, and to obtain know-how. Time can come from household adults or extended family and friends. Know-how (in other words, competence in theories of social practice or human capital in economics) includes the skills that allow household members to produce usable goods and services in the home, to trade their time for a higher-than-subsistence wage, and to find and understand information about sustainability practices. Obtaining knowhow requires time, and in some cases money.

However, these resources are not limitless. In particular, households describe making decisions on a foundation of limited time and limited money, with time constraints by far the most common concern of my informants. Households are also constrained by social and cultural norms, particularly around cleanliness. Finally, information about sustainability and sustainability practices can be difficult to find, and in some cases accurate information is not available.

Household resources

Resources from waged work

Every household I spoke with had at least one adult who engaged in waged work or self-employment for money, and both adults worked for money in nearly all of the households with two adults. Heather decided on a career as a nurse because she knew the schedule would be compatible with her desire be available for her children during the day, and Emily's hours as a consultant are flexible and have allowed her to adjust her schedule to accommodate childcare obligations during her children's different life stages.

The social and cultural meanings of cleanliness and comfort have evolved over time, generally in ways that demand more resources (Shove 2003). The temperatures that feel comfortable indoors, and the actions people take and the equipment they use to remain comfortable, are matters of cultural expectations and social norms, but the equipment and infrastructures in homes recursively reinforces expectations about how people should feel indoors and what steps they ought to take to feel that way. And ironically, as new supposedly time-saving domestic technologies emerge, cleaning practices and the demand for cleanliness have changed in ways that demand more unwaged time rather than less (Cowan 1983). Changes in infrastructures and technologies, like central heating and in-home washing machines, make these evolutions in cultural expectations possible, and even recursively reinforce the normalcy of these expectations. So while cleanliness and comfort involve mundane habits that are easily taken for granted, my informants have made changes to conventional ways of getting things done to make their practices more sustainable. In some cases, these changes take more unwaged time (as Cowan 1983 documents) but in other cases these changes—intriguingly—result in less unwaged time devoted to mundane household practices.

Cleanliness

Shove (2003, 10) says that demand escalators don't run backwards, but the ways that my informants have changed their showering, laundry, and household cleaning habits provide concrete examples of very real demanddecreasing changes in practices and accompanying changes in the meaning of cleanliness. Some of these changes involve taking additional unwaged time to perform cleaning activities in more labor-intensive ways that avoid the use of energy or “chemicals,” or purchasing special cleaning products, but other changes involve simply reducing the frequency of cleaning, thus actually reducing the amount of unwaged work involved.

Showering

The history of personal hygiene in the United States by Bushman and Bushman (1988) reveals that the meaning and practices associated with personal cleanliness have changed substantially since the 18th century, when even affluent Americans might never bathe, cleaning themselves instead with an occasional sponge bath—a wet cloth and no soap. The accompanying infrastructure—a washbasin—was still a fairly rare item to find in U.S. homes, and bathtubs were completely absent. By 1900, bathing practices had changed such that most Americans bathed fairly regularly, though still far less than we do today, as bodily cleanliness began to take on new social and moral meanings.

None of my informants grew up exactly the same way that they live now, so many of them had to spend considerable amounts of time and effort to learn about sustainability and new sustainable ways of getting things done in everyday life. They talk to friends and family members, they read books and websites, and they learn on the job as part of their waged work to gain practical know-how and to acquire information that helps them make more environmental choices. These efforts might be called “human capital acquisition” in the jargon of neoclassical economics—investments in productivity-enhancing skills that involved a trade-off to acquire. In other words, my informants’ research represents time—and in some cases, also money—that could have been used for some other purpose but that was dedicated to gaining skills and knowledge. Or, these efforts might be seen as gaining “competence” in theories of social practice—“which encompasses skill, know-how, and technique” (Shove, Pantzar, & Watson 2012, 14). And these efforts to acquire know-how that is useful for bringing everyday life into alignment with pro-environmental values can be thought of as one component of the unwaged work that takes place in these eco-conscious households—an input into the household production process.

In the time since these interviews were conducted, the concept of “doing one's own research” became associated during the COVID-19 pandemic with skeptics organizing anti-mask rallies, refusing vaccines, and taking unproven treatments or preventatives such as medications formulated for livestock. The phrase now appears with the word “research” in quotation marks in internet memes, such as “2021: I did my own ‘research’ “ engraved on a gravestone, or “You keep using this word ‘research.’ I don't think it means what you think it means,” featuring a photo of Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride. Today, “doing one's own research” is a position that is contrasted unfavorably by critics of these conspiracy theorists with scientists who do “real” research.

Many of my informants do not see “science” as neutral, and they do not trust the government, scientists, or the medical establishment to produce research or recommendations that promote environmental preservation or the safety of their families.

In this chapter, I will present a version of the Marxist-feminist theoretical framework that I originally outlined in my 2019 article in the journal Science & Society. This chapter is admittedly dry and somewhat out of step with the rest of the book. If you are less theoretically oriented and more interested in the description of mundane practices I promised you in the Introduction, you can feel free to skip this chapter without missing too much. However, for theoretically oriented readers interested in the debates in Marxist-feminism or household production, this chapter is for you.

I initially developed this model based on what I learned from my ecoconscious informants during the ethnographic interviews I conducted in the spring of 2017. While it is somewhat a cliché that parents of young children are tired, I was nonetheless struck by just how exhausted my informants were. Even the most affluent among them, who had substantial extended family and/or paid assistance with everyday household tasks, were struggling to cope. And even the low-income single mothers in my sample told me that they most needed more time rather than more money. I realized that these households were making substitutions of time for money in producing a version of everyday life that felt more in line with their environmental values. Not only that, but they were taking on additional time-consuming tasks, such as recycling sorting, in order to avoid or “undo” environmental damage from other sites, scales, and sectors. At the same time, my informants were generally deeply dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the overall ineffectiveness of these interventions—no matter how many time-consuming changes they made to their everyday practices, it felt like a drop in the bucket. The environment is still being destroyed, and many of my informants were acutely aware of their complicit role in this destruction despite their best efforts.

Having been trained somewhat paradoxically in both Marxist-feminist and neoclassical theories of household production in graduate school, I was able to draw on these seemingly contradictory frameworks to help me explain what I uncovered in my interviews. As I will explain, other existing theoretical frameworks would point to more reformist or redistributionoriented solutions to the problems and concerns of my informants.

On the grid

Partway through my interview with Heather—a nurse, doula, lactation consultant, multilevel marketing essential oils saleswoman, and White mother of three young children—she excused herself for a moment to check on the placenta that she was processing in an electric fruit dehydrator. Dehydrating, grinding up, and then encapsulating placentas into pill form for easier postpartum ingestion is just one of Heather's many side hustles related to natural living. By this point in my interviews with ecologically conscious parents in and around Portland, Oregon, in the Northwestern United States, I had learned to maintain a neutral demeanor when confronted with unusual practices and comments that made me feel uncomfortable or with which I disagreed. But the essential oil diffuser gently misting the air in Heather's immaculately clean home took on a different meaning knowing that a human placenta was cooking in the next room. I felt immediately queasy, but I did my best to act like this was the most normal thing in the world. Great, no problem. I channeled the neutral “brisk nurse” affect I was taught to use as an interviewer for a lesbian health study years earlier but had mostly refrained from using in this study in favor of the warmer affect I hoped would generate good rapport with my eco-conscious informants. As soon as I got back into my car after the interview, I pulled out my phone and googled: “is eating placenta cannibalism?”

Heather told me, “My husband tells me that I can't do it all, and I understand that, but we can make little steps and those will all be helpful. Anything we can make and be away from consumerism and capitalism.” In contrast to her own difficult childhood, Heather has deliberately arranged her life to devote as much time as possible to her children, and she works hard to protect her children from harm. She has been breastfeeding continuously for the past seven years, nursing each of her older children until they were at least four years old. During our interview, she was breastfeeding and bargaining with her youngest child—a two-year-old—to please eat her lunch instead of nursing more. Heather researches health choices for her family extensively, and she is very skeptical of conventional medicine and cleaning products, both of which she generally avoids.

Conflicts due to differences in preferences, priorities, and the social meanings associated with mundane practices within households are the premise of countless television sitcoms—between parents and their adult children in Absolutely Fabulous, Frasier, and Steptoe and Son; between parents and their children in The Simpsons, Family Ties, Out of this World, and King of the Hill; between spouses in Bewitched, I Love Lucy, Dharma & Greg, and Keeping up Appearances; between nonrelated adults living together, as in Mr. Belvedere, The Nanny, Who's the Boss, Father Ted, and Perfect Strangers. In each of these cases, these differences are exploited for comedic effect. In the 1963 Steptoe and Son episode “The Bath,” the more fastidious and forward-looking adult son Harold explains to his rag-and-bone-man father Albert—who seems trapped in the late 19th century—that their current arrangement of bathing infrequently in a metal basin in the front room is no longer acceptable: “A lot of people don't live like that anymore … Those days is gone. It's a social stigma these days. You might as well have a horse sitting in the armchair and be done with it.” Harold interprets his father's bathing practices as acts of “extreme dirtiness”—a meaning not shared by Albert.

Each of the households I spoke with for this book have their own unique combinations of environmental priorities, resources, and constraints—described in detail in Chapters 3 and 4—and conflict often arises both within and across households when these differences clash and compromise proves difficult. Chasms between the social meaning of practices can be too large to cross, particularly for these household members who are outside the “mainstream” and for whom the environmental stakes of mundane practices feel high. My informants often laughed—sometimes nervously—when they revealed these conflicts to me. While these sorts of interpersonal conflicts were generally conveyed in a lighthearted and affectionate manner, these differences are a real source of tension and stress, and at times have the potential to harm household members’ physical or emotional well-being.

Interpersonal conflict in households where priorities and the social meaning of practices clash is relatable—this is perhaps why these culture clashes and fish-out-of-water household scenarios are such persistent themes in television sitcoms.

The 23 households I met with over the course of the spring in 2017 were more different from each other than I initially expected. I had assumed that sustainability in Portland, Oregon, would be a largely liberal White upper-middle-class phenomenon, and that the practices would primarily serve as conspicuous forms of class distinction and display. However, the informants and households I spoke with represented more diversity than I anticipated—in personal backgrounds, household configurations, socioeconomic status, political leanings, education, race and ethnicity, and the gender of the householders.

Despite these differences, the adults in these households share a common, sincerely held desire to do the right thing for their children, households, communities, and planet. My informants try to make decisions for their households and balance their sustainability priorities with constrained resources, which often involves fairly major interventions into conventional ways of getting things done in order to bring their everyday practices into alignment with their values. I learned that there is not a single “sustainability,” with households engaging in sustainability practices to varying degrees of intensity along a green spectrum. Rather, sustainability represents a broad set of values and beliefs for these Portland households, with sustainability practices influenced by the unique combinations of priorities, resources, and constraints in each household.

Mike and Mina have two large cars that they use for long daily drives from their suburban home to their various obligations. For Mina, whose Middle Eastern extended family lives nearby, the primary focus in the sustainability realm is the health of herself and her family members. For this reason, she makes her own natural deodorant, gives her children alternative remedies like elderberry syrup, and prepares elaborate home-cooked vegetarian meals with organic ingredients she buys during her frequent trips to far-flung grocery stores. As a stay-at-home mother, she sees her unpaid time as her major contribution to the household. David and Dayna, on the other hand, are both White professionals who work in downtown Portland. They own only one car and commute to their daily obligations almost exclusively by bicycle, including dropping their infant child off at daycare. They have governmentsubsidized solar panels and energy-efficiency devices in their home, but they eat a lot of frozen convenience foods and takeout meals since becoming parents.