By Sarah Williams, Anja Schaefer, & Richard Blundel
At times of crisis, our human values come to the fore. The global response to COVID-19 is certainly bringing out the best and the worst in us. Some people are buying guns and emptying shelves to stockpile their own supplies. Others are risking their own lives to save others, while whole communities are coming together to support one another. These developments have prompted profound critical reflection and debate, which has also been deeply infused with values. Many people, including business leaders, have recognised that we cannot simply return to the old ‘normal’. Instead, we need to abandon outdated structures, replacing them with new political institutions and business models to secure a more just, equitable, and sustainable prosperity for ourselves and future generations.
Without always realising it, we draw on our personal values when we talk and act. We do this because our values are at the root of who we are – what we think of ourselves, how we behave, what motivates us, how we see the world, and our hopes and dreams. Our paper highlights the key role that values can play in addressing the profoundly urgent, messy and contentious issue of climate change. We used the Schwartz Value System (Schwartz & Bilksy, 1990) as a framework to explore how owners and managers of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) drew on values as they sought to make sense of climate change. While carbon footprints of individual businesses may appear modest, their aggregate impact is significant. Our aim was to gain a better understanding of how values shaped these processes and to generate insights that could inform environmental policy initiatives.
We found that SME owners and managers draw on a range of values; some prioritise economic growth and personal authority (‘Power’ values), whereas others draw on ‘Achievement’ values that emphasise effectiveness, reliability, and making a difference. Relatively few of the managers drew on the ‘Universalist’ values most commonly associated with environmental protection messages, but many more were inspired by ‘Benevolence’ values and expressed their concerns about climate change in terms of the well-being of their own family, employees, and local community. We also found a particular type of manager, who drew on both Achievement and Benevolence values, as well as values around curiosity, self-direction and innovation. These managers were often most inclined to see climate change mitigation as their business responsibility.
The current COVID-19 crisis does not reduce the urgent need to address the looming climate emergency. Some have argued that newly rediscovered personal and community values could be harnessed to the transform global responses to climate change. Our research suggests that it is also essential to become more sensitive to the personal, professional, and organisational values that underpin these responses.
The key message of our paper for policymakers and advisors is to pay much closer attention to the values of business owners and managers, and to work with the values that managers already hold (For example, ‘Promoting Sustainability in Business: a Values Based Toolkit’, an online course for business advisors). This means going beyond conventional ‘win-win’ approaches to business greening while also avoiding purely altruistic appeals that are unlikely to resonate with many businesses, particularly while they are struggling with the economic dislocation unleashed by COVID-19. If we can connect with a wider range of values, we will be much better placed to promote the fundamental changes that are so urgently required.
References
Schaefer, A., Williams, S., & Blundel, R. 2020. Individual Values and SME Environmental Engagement. Business & Society, 59(4): 642–675. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0007650317750134
Schwartz, S. H., & Bilsky, W. 1990. Toward a theory of the universal content and structure of values: Extensions and cross-cultural replications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58: 878-89.