Looking through the “greenwashing glass cage” of the green league table towards the sustainability challenge for UK universities

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to critically focus on the UK's People & Planet's “green league table” in order to explore to what extent such league tables contribute to the transitional and transdisciplinary challenge of ecological sustainability for universities.

Design/methodology/approach

By taking a narrative and metaphorical perspective, the paper endeavours to understand how the green league table impacts on university greening, particularly around the apparent disengagement of academic and non‐academic actors in their bio‐cultural connection.

Findings

The paper conceptualizes the ecological sustainability challenge for universities by arguing that current sustainability managerial agendas and narratives, promoted by league tables are underpinned by what is conceptualized as the primacy of the “greenwashing glass cage” organisational metaphor. This highlights the self‐serving nature of sustainability approaches by managerial technocrats, consisting of carbon officers, sustainability managers predominantly based in estates departments. Drawing on the immediacy and “common‐sense”, doomsday imperative and legitimacy of the climate change agenda rather than embracing the wider inherent social, environmental and economic stakeholder conflicts and systemic bio‐cultural engagement challenges of sustainability, this top‐down, punitive, self‐satisfied approach around carbon targets and performance measures self‐perpetuates the myth that sustainable universities contribute effectively to the wider ecological challenge.

Originality/value

This paper not only offers a critique and warning against the blind adherence to league tables within university but also proposes a new grounded bio‐cultural and defamiliarizing narrative for universities. This narrative represents a more inclusive, non‐instrumental, contextual, experiential approach to ecological sustainability.

Citation

Jones, D.R. (2012), "Looking through the “greenwashing glass cage” of the green league table towards the sustainability challenge for UK universities", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 630-647. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534811211239263