Sam Lubbe

Synthesis of green IS frameworks for achieving strong environmental sustainability in organisations

People are entirely dependent on the environment for existence. In spite of this crucial dependency, human activities are degrading the Earths environment. The degradation now threatens the wellbeing of all people and possibly the long-term survival of the human race. Environmental degradation has many dire symptoms, such as anthropogenic climate change including global warming, deforestation, water and air pollution, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, and depleted fish stocks, all of which are intensified by an increasing global human population. Environmental sustainability is the solution to environmental degradation, and emphasises maintenance of the environment in order to support human life into the far future. There are several degrees of environmental sustainability, namely very weak, weak, strong, and very strong or absurdly strong. Of these, the overwhelming scientific consensus on environmental degradation necessitates strong environmental sustainability. Organisations are prevailing and prominent social structures that drive the worlds economy. Nevertheless, organisations continue to degrade the environmental during the extraction of natural resources, production and processing, and the emission of wastes. However, organisations have considerable resources for achieving environmental sustainability, in the form of technology, global reach, knowledge, power, innovative capacity, motivation, and the capacity for change. Organisational change is impacted by Information systems (IS), which have been influential in enabling and transforming the worlds organisations over the past fifty years. IS include information technology (IT) hardware and software, people, processes, and have specific purposes. Green IS includes Green IT, which focuses primarily on environmental sustainability throughout the IT lifecycle, and Green IS aim to enable and transform entire organisations toward environmental sustainability. Green IS present a fundamental solution to organisational environmental degradation, and researchers have developed numerous Green IS frameworks in this regard, each with a particular and significant perspective. This paper responds to the urgency of achieving strong environmental sustainability by synthesising the existing Green IS frameworks into a single Green IS framework that is purposefully aligned to strong environmental sustainability. This paper is theoretical and exploratory in nature, and makes an original contribution by providing a synthesised Green IS framework aligned to the concept of strong environmental sustainability.

Green IS: Enabling, Transforming, Both, or Neither?

The problem addressed in this paper is the ambiguity that exists in the usage of the terms “enable” and “transform” and their related forms in the Green IS literature. This ambiguity creates uncertainty, both conceptual and practical, about the precise role of Green IS in these research and use contexts. Consequently, the exact relationship between Green IS and environmental sustainability can be obscured. The objective then was to disambiguate these terms and their related forms by defining them independently from the Green IS literature, and subsequently using those independent meanings to content analyze their use in the top journals in the IS field. The results provided evidence that the enabling role was far more prominent than the transforming role. Nevertheless, while distinct, both roles are are equally significant and valuable for environmental sustainability. However, based on the relative frequencies, the enabling role of Green IS provides more frequent environmental sustainability returns. Thus, it may be preferable for Green IS research to focus on exposing the enabling capabilities of Green IS for optimal success in the multitudinous environmental sustainability scenarios.