Small Holds Sway: How Small Businesses Mobilize Knowledge to Support Action in Learning Processes for Sustainability Transformations

TLDR: This article examined industry transformations in the brewing sector in Canada and Germany and showed how metanarratives shape these processes by making tacitly held understandings explicit in language, externalizing alternative organizing principles around "the art of making" and "cooperation as a means to prosper".

Abstract: Narratives are central to the organization and transformation of society due to their ability to maintain stability and promote change. This dual ability is realized by metanarratives as they articulate and reiterate the organizing principles that underpin social arrangements and shape the development of related storylines. Narratives can also be mobilized to justify and legitimize change processes through sensemaking that articulates alternative perspectives and verbalizes new realities into existence. However, previous research has not explicitly examined the reciprocal interdependence of these processes, and a nuanced understanding of how new narratives are constructed by and among organizations is still missing. Responding to this gap, this research empirically explores how small businesses draw on organizing principles for making sense of their attempt to transform industrialized production and consumption systems into more sustainable versions. The examined industry transformations in the brewing sector in Canada and Germany show how metanarratives shape these processes by making tacitly held understandings explicit in language, externalizing alternative organizing principles around ‘the art of making’ and ‘cooperation as a means to prosper.’ The case studies illustrate how studied small businesses creatively draw on these organizing principles to make sense of new action contexts in a way that challenges industrial and competitive industry arrangements; these alternative metanarratives support small businesses to create new meaning categories around ‘aesthetics’ and ‘affective work’ (i.e., creating and managing emotions), and establish a ‘collaborative ethos’ as well as ‘relational identities.’ This research demonstrates that the constructed narratives of change that guide industry transformations toward sustainability do not emerge in a vacuum and that both alternative organizing principles of metanarratives and the sensemaking of actors are mutually dependent.