Organizing and sustainable development between the local and global: The case of a Tibetan enterprise
Abstract
In this dissertation, I investigate how place and space guide organizations towards sustainable development. The current paradigm for business organizing seeks economic efficiency, whereas a sustainable development paradigm requires businesses to accommodate the ecological, social, and economic principles between the local and global. Yet, as organizations are increasingly globalizing and virtualizing, they are becoming increasingly placeless. The loss of local connection to place is one of the primary reasons sustainable development is so elusive.
I am motivated to understand better organizations' role between the local and global on sustainable development. To answer the question, I collected qualitative data through conducting ethnography at LuxuryYak,[1] a place-based Tibetan luxury enterprise. I developed three essays that collectively explored the mechanisms through which organizations could detect and address sustainable development issues. The first two essays (Essays #1 and #2) are empirical papers grounded in the data, providing insights on how locally embedded organizations can detect and address large-scale global sustainable development issues. Inspired by the empirical phenomenon, Essay #3 is a conceptual piece that focuses on elaborating the role of multinational enterprises on sustainable development between the local and global.
The essays contribute to the literature on organizational attention, sense of place and sustainable development, and international business research on location and country specific resources. I also made an empirical contribution by studying an organization in a Tibetan nomadic village to provide new ways of thinking about business research on sustainability.
[1] All names of villages, organizations and individuals in this dissertation are pseudonyms.