Paul Nieuwenhuis

Operationalizing Deep Structural Sustainability in Business: Longitudinal Immersion as Extensive Engaged Scholarship

This paper offers an innovative perspective on engaged scholarship as multiple, cumulative interactions between academia and external organizations in the business and policy realms. A definition of longitudinal immersion is positioned relative to the extant literature on academic engagement as a dialectic relationship between academic research and the praxis of business and society. Using a case study of a specific academic theoretical concept, we seek to demonstrate how over a period of some 25 years the ideas and practice of deep structural sustainability have co-evolved through a process of reflexivity. Drawing from critical management studies and design science we give a different perspective on the processes and mechanisms of engagement and the question of the nature of impact. Notwithstanding the challenges thus presented to researchers in nurturing the ability for informed creativity, it is concluded that future opportunities for engagement and impact may be captured by a longer-term, value-driven and less episodic approach to the entire research process.

5 – Sector shift, inter-sector dynamics and futures studies

I took the idea of the larger paradigm to mean that the answers we are looking for are not always in the obvious places, as the overall equation is fundamentally influenced by other, often less than obvious, considerations . (Gillespie, 2001, ix)

15 – The shape of the future

… the present system is destroying itself by destroying its markets. Poor people do not make good customers so, for as long as the polarisation of the world into rich and poor continues, sales to the less well off will shrink, and markets serving the better-off will become increasingly competitive. This is already happening. There is excess production capacity in most manufacturing activities, and prices of items such as shoes, clothing, cars and electrical goods are falling in real terms. It has become very hard indeed to find investment projects involving making tangible goods that can offer a high return . (Meyer, 2000: 31)

13 – Automobility 2050 – the vision

… one may well imagine that the motor vehicle of AD2000 will beinfinitely more similar to the one of 1950 than todays car is to the model of 1900 . (Gregoire, 1954: 109)

3 – Markets and the demand for cars

What Sloan chose to call ‘constant upgrading of product’ is more accurately described as planned obsolescence through cosmetic changes. In diametric opposition to the Ford Model T product philosophy of a single, static model at an ever decreasing unit price, GM attempted to produce ‘a car for every purse and purpose’. Sloanism called for blanketing the market with a car at the top of every price range and encouraging the consumer to trade up … (Flink, 1988: 234)

11 – Sustainable mobility

We want to construct some kind of machine that will last forever…We want a man who buys one of our products never to have to buy another . (Henry Ford, quoted in Batchelor, 1994: 53)

8 – High volume car production: Budd and Ford

Up to the introduction of the moving assembly line at the Ford Highland Park plant in 1913–1914, automobiles were made and sold in much the same way on both sides of the Atlantic; that is they were assembled from jobbed-out components by crews of skilled mechanics and unskilled helpers at low rates of labor productivity, and they were sold at high prices and high unit profits through nonexclusive wholesale and retail distributors for cash on delivery . (Flink, 1988: 40)

7 – Fuel cells and the hydrogen economy

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things . (N. Machiavelli, 1513, cited by Lane, 2002)

6 – Powertrain and fuel

The motor car affords expeditious and reasonably sure means of getting over the country – always ready when you are ready, subservient to your whim to visit some inaccessible old ruin, flying over the broad main highways… and is a method of locomotion to which the English people have become tolerant if not positively friendly . (Murphy, 1908: 5–6)

9 – Alternatives to high volume car production

One of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that ‘the problem of production’ has been solved. Not only is this belief firmly held by people remote from production and therefore professionally unacquainted with the facts – it is held by virtually all the experts, the captains of industry, the economic managers in the governments of the world, the academic and not-so-academic economists, not to mention the economic journalists . (Schumacher, 1973: 10)