Learning with The Natural Step: Cooperative ecological inquiry through cases, theory and practice for sustainable development

My dissertation is a proposition generating case study of the Swedish environmental organization 'The Natural Step.' The central research focus concerns how individuals, acting in and through organizations, can help effect social change in support of sustainable development.; Sustainable development necessitates attention to both technological issues as well as issues of social process. To date considerably more emphasis has been placed on the former. A premise of my work is that it is not enough to develop a 'right solution' to our global environmental problems, we must also inquire into changing our individual and organizational behaviors so that such solutions can be meaningfully enacted. This dissertation is about one way in which such change can occur. Dialogue and inquiry, what I call 'attractive conversations in personal networks,' are central to this way.; My thesis is that dialogue and inquiry on sustainable development, which engages representatives from both the cultural and economic spheres of society, can bring desired structures into being. Such dialogue occurs in small personal networks.; The method I chose for learning about The Natural Step is a 'learning history,' which I situate within the trajectory of action approaches to research. It offers a thick description of the conversations for change which occurred from 1988 to 1994 among cultural and economic thought leaders in Sweden.; A secondary analysis is then also offered to help bring a 'big picture' coherence to the learning history. This analysis is informed by theory on structuration and dialogue. My efforts in the secondary analysis are to make visible some of the structures (or societal-cultural rules) by which individuals' efforts for change may be enabled. I thereby situate the development of sustainable practices catalyzed by dialogue and inquiry initiated by The Natural Step within larger fields of power and social structures. The propositions I develop derive from a causal loop diagramming of the organizing process which I theorize to underlie The Natural Step.