Matthew Archer’s Unsustainable critiques the frameworks used to measure corporate sustainability and exposes how market-driven reporting shirks environmental responsibility. This convincing and timely work highlights the difficulty of pinning down what sustainability means, and calls for more robust systems of holding corporations to account in the face of an escalating climate crisis, writes Evelyn Langford.
What makes a corporation unsustainable?
Amid the ongoing climate crisis, sustainable practices are a key concern in global policy and corporate guidelines. Whether through greenwashed marketing, public disclosure of environmental data or the common pledge of being “net zero” (balancing the addition and removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere), corporations want you to know that they’ve heard you, and they’re trying their best. At the same time, academics and sustainability experts are continually attempting to delineate what defines a corporation as sustainable? On the other hand, what brands a corporation as unsustainable? If deemed unsustainable, what tools has the corporation been measured against and failed?
Matthew Archer seeks to clarify corporate environmental responsibility in Unsustainable, writing from a dual academic background in environmental studies and politics. Drawing on five years of ethnography across North America and Europe, Archer critically assesses how corporations measure their socio-environmental impacts. From the introduction, where Archer outlines his stance on current corporate sustainability reporting measures, there is an overwhelming tone of dissatisfaction with corporations’ disclosure of environmental data and how it is framed. Corporate environmental responsibility and sustainability has previously been discussed by social scientist Joel Bakan in his 2003 book, The Corporation, businessman John Elkington in his conception of the “Triple Bottom Line” (1994) and ex-Unilever CEO Paul Polman’s Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take (2021).
An overreliance on defining sustainability by numerical and technical measures overshadows grounded, contextual accounts of sustainability efforts
As the concept of greenwashing suggests – when corporations mislead the public by claiming to be more sustainable than they truly are – many companies seem to believe that reporting data concerning their environmental output – be that fast fashion companies’ water pollution in Cambodia or industrial tomato farms in Florida – is enough to make them environmentalist. This type of reporting is problematic, Archer argues. An overreliance on defining sustainability by numerical and technical measures overshadows grounded, contextual accounts of sustainability efforts. This oversimplifies the nuanced concept of corporate sustainability and feeds into confusion over the authenticity of sustainability efforts. Fixating on quantitative figures as sustainability indicators appears to yield little to no real change, Archer argues, which raises questions on the reason for such reporting at all.
Insights from organisations in Geneva
Archer draws upon his ethnography conducted in Geneva in 2015-2016 to explore the meaning of sustainability to professionals working in sustainable development. He discovered that hundreds of thousands of jobs are labelled as “sustainability” roles online, with such roles encompassing a breadth of responsibilities. From interviewing individuals in various sustainability roles – from top NGOs to private Swiss banks – Archer concluded that sustainability does not have a fixed definition among them. Such professionals believe that their quantification of sustainability is enacted to motivate marketisation, allowing the market to channel the data collected into the deemed correct “channels” for sustainability initiatives. Emphasis on the role of marketisation in promoting sustainability lays the foundations for Archer’s discussion of “neoliberal sustainability”, a concept referenced continually in the book. Neoliberal sustainability cites current inefficiencies within corporate sustainability and climate degradation as the fault of imperfect markets: an orientation to this problem as opposed to a solution.
Linguistic anthropologist NJ Enfield claims that meanings as unstable, but their inherent subjectivity remains useful in communicating an idea with social, political and ethical implications. Archer invokes this idea when emphasising the lack of an objective meaning to sustainability, allowing corporations to produce their own definition to abide by. Through creating their own sustainability quantifiers and choosing what environmental data they wish to report, corporations act as both the “judge and the jury”. Such omnipotent governance over sustainability initiatives by the very institutions that are supposed to be obeying them seems to defeat the point of creating markers for sustainability, Archer contends.
Corporations can cherry-pick which statistics to display to portray themselves in a favorable light, shown in consumer communications from corporations like Nestlé and Volkswagen.
First identified by Donella and Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers et al. in Limits to Growth (1972), there is a persistent conflict between sustainability and profit maximisation. Corporations are pressed to reconcile this conflict in the eyes of consumers and environmentalists. Archer emphasises that corporations act in their own economic interest, weighing up implementing sustainability measures against the financial returns or losses incurred. Informants from Archer’s ethnographies felt sustainability in the corporate world is constricted by a desire for profits, and that an incrementalist approach to sustainable practices will always trump a radicalist one in the eyes of large companies and investors. Corporations can cherry-pick which statistics to display to portray themselves in a favorable light, shown in consumer communications from corporations like Nestlé and Volkswagen. Archer references Milne and Grays’ concept of an “empty signifier” when discussing the hollow nature of definitions of sustainability, a hollowness that allows for open interpretation of what constitutes a sustainability measure.
The future of sustainability
With recent bills rescinding environmental funding (notably Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill of 2025), Archer emphasises the need for a radical approach amidst a current “eery” (183) inaction against climate change. Archer discusses the importance of postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives on sustainability, citing efforts made by Indigenous-led activists to mitigate against environmental harm like pipeline construction in Canada. An intersectional approach to climate change is essential for capturing the socio-ecological vulnerabilities that overlap between different groups, and the inclusion of this approach grounds Archer’s work and points to ways forward. Unsustainable may have further benefitted from elaborating on the links between corporate sustainability measures, race and geography. Environmental racism and geographically disproportionate impacts of corporate growth are a prominent, growing sub-field in environmental sociology. With rapid technological growth like the rise of AI – which puts a large strain on water supplies for areas bordering data centres – as well as the pollution caused by mass commodity production in the Global South, this could have been worth exploring as a sub-section.
Archer has created a compelling and rich work that encourages readers to contest what sustainability means and how it should be measured by large corporations.
The Brundtland Report conceptualises sustainability as meeting the needs of today without compromising the needs of tomorrow. Throughout the book Archer questions around who has defined these needs, how are they deemed to have been met and whether the current infrastructure of corporate sustainability will suffice for the needs of the future. This makes for a thought-provoking interrogation, a set of perspectives substantiated by his own research on the ongoing puzzle of corporate sustainability in its valuing, measuring and reporting. However, he does not seek to answer this puzzle as such. By incorporating accounts from sustainability professionals, citing noted economists and sociologists and referencing neoliberal solutions, Archer has created a compelling and rich work that encourages readers to contest what sustainability means and how it should be measured by large corporations.
Unsustainable contributes significantly to the fields of environmental sociology and economics by questioning the decades-old conflict of corporate sustainability versus profit maximisation and contesting the corporations’ framing of sustainability as an economic dilemma. Future work will benefit from Archer’s navigation of corporate attitudes towards sustainability measuring and reporting. This rich ethnography and theoretical exploration of corporate governance and the role of neoliberal sustainability invites more researchers to build upon the scholarship in the face of an escalating environmental crisis.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image: fotdmike on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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