Going beyond the hegemonic sustainability imaginary

While there is a broadening consensus that we must transition towards more “sustainable” ways of doing business, the inexorable advance of climate change suggests that we are failing at doing so. We suggest that this failure can be traced to the ideological hegemony propagated by the dominant intellectual class (Gramsci, 1974). This hegemony is maintained through publications in leading business journals which act as central gatekeepers in the circulation of popular sustainability ideas. Based on an interdisciplinary review of sustainability studies published in these journals, the present paper exposes the ideological assumptions underlying the ‘right-orientation environmentalism’ (Foster, 2014) characterizing the hegemonic sustainability imaginary and offers some directions to go beyond its constraints.