Understanding the puzzle of organizational sustainability: toward a conceptual framework of organizational social connectedness and sustainability

ABSTRACT

Much scholarship on organizational sustainability has focused on organizational survival and strategies aimed at financial independence. However, there is increasing awareness that organizational social connectedness may be equally important for longer-term organizational sustainability. This article bridges theories of organizational survival, social connectedness, and sustainability research, with sustainable management practices from the field of the US culture nonprofits to investigate the questions: What are the antecedents of organizational social connectedness? What role does social connectedness play for the sustainability of organizations? Our analysis results in a conceptual framework of the relationship between the social connectedness and sustainability of cultural nonprofits.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational sustainability
• social connectedness
• arts and culture nonprofits
• sustainable management

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Brenda Bushouse, Michael Rushton, and Wayne State University Humanities Center Resident Scholars 2015–2016 for sharing their insights and providing helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments helped to strengthen the paper’s argument and refine its contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The expansion of the social sustainability literature is inspired by growing scholarly attention to the consequences of urbanization, natural and human-made disasters that disproportionally affect groups of urban population, urban revival trends, and the social consequences of revitalization, especially the issues of affordability and access of public services (Dempsey et al. 2011; Koppenjan and Enserink 2009; Vallance, Perkins, and Dixon 2011).

2. Socially responsible corporations focus on balancing present-day stakeholder interests by developing sustainable management approaches that minimize their negative environmental, social, and economic impacts on stakeholders (Ahlstrom 2010; Florea, Cheung, and Herndon 2013; Moizer and Tracey 2010; Schaltegger et al. 2014). Although TBL is a highly influential way of defining sustainability at the meso level, in the context of public and nonprofit organizations one should be careful about mimicking the private sectors’ focus on profit maximization, since public service organizations should be primarily focused on creating social value (Moore 2000; Weerawardena, Robert, and Mort 2010) and maximizing overall public interest (Bozeman 2007) rather than their own bottom lines.

3. Although there is no single conventional definition of social value, this article understands social value as the overall outcomes and impact of programs and interventions designed by public service organizations for the betterment of society in a given domain of their mission-relevant activity (education, culture, environment, economy, social welfare, etc.). Such an interpretation of social value is consistent with Weerawardena, Robert, and Mort (2010), who consider social value creation to be the primary goal of nonprofit organizations in society, as well as with Moore (2000), who defines social value as ‘the value produced by nonprofit organizations [that] lies in the achievement of social purposes rather than in generating revenues.’ Our understanding of social value as pursued by organizations also contributes to the overall public interest, defined by Bozeman (2007, 12) as ‘outcomes best serving the long-run survival and well-being of a social collective construed as a public.’

4. The universe of American arts and culture organizations includes two main groups: professional organizations managed by full-time staff (e.g. symphonies, orchestras, art galleries and museums, historical societies) and community-based creative activities (e.g. community theaters, ethnic cultural societies, folk art, and craft) (Toepler and Wyszomirski 2012). We focus on the first type in order to capture older long-standing institutions with a substantial history of achieving sustainability in the face of numerous pressures and turbulences.

5. The example of the Belle Isle Aquarium is included in this article for several reasons. First, the US Economic Census of Arts Entertainment and Recreation Industry Series includes a variety of organizations such as zoos, botanical gardens, and natural parks, alongside with other major arts and culture industries (Toepler and Wyszomirski 2012). Second, the Belle Isle Aquarium is a hybrid organization that includes both environmental education and cultural preservation. The aquarium is one of Detroit’s oldest historical symbols and the first public aquarium in the United States. Additionally, it is housed in a building with historical and architectural significance. As pointed out by one of this article’s reviewers, the ‘resurrected’ Belle Isle Aquarium is a reinvented institution that has a higher degree of social connectedness and, consequently, higher prospects for longer-term sustainability as compared with the original institution.

6. For more details on the membership requirements and the size of the membership base of the American Association of Museum Directors, see the membership section of the association’s web site (https://aamd.org/about/membership).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wayne State University Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship under Grant ‘From Survival to Sustainability: Community-Based Pathways for Urban Arts Institutions.’

Notes on contributors

Alisa Moldavanova

Alisa Moldavanova is an assistant professor of public administration in the Political Science Department at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). Her research interests include sustainability and intergenerational justice, organization theory, public and nonprofit management, public administration theory, and public service ethics.

Holly T. Goerdel

Holly T. Goerdel is an associate professor of public administration at the University of Kansas. Her research has focused on the contributions of public management and collaboration to performance in the areas of security and information sharing, cybersecurity, and education. Her research now also extends to concerns of accountability in contracting for war and social control