Sustainability for People and the Planet: Placing Workers at the Center of Sustainability Research

Though workers face a series of critical challenges in contemporary work organizations, they are often overlooked in conversations about sustainable business. In this chapter, we argue that prioritizing the rights and well-being of workers is a core dimension of sustainability along with the preservation of the environment. We review scholarship on corporate social responsibility, then identify psychological and structural empowerment as two key dimensions of human sustainability. Drawing on empirical findings emerging from research on hybrid organizing, we argue that organizational democracy has the potential to empower workers and promote their well-being, while enabling the simultaneous pursuit of social, environmental, and financial objectives. We propose a research agenda to investigate how democratic organizing and sustainability are intertwined, calling for interdisciplinary research that attends to the importance of legal and institutional frameworks that support organizations’ pursuit of a sustainable future. In doing so, we draw attention to potential synergies as well as conflicts between organizational democracy and sustainability, with implications for worker well-being and inequality.