Practicing What We Teach (and Research) (original) (raw)

2015, Organization & Environment

Colleagues and Other Dear Readers-an introductory note on this editorial: a couple of years ago, in an early editorial after J. Alberto Aragon-Correa and I officially became Co-Editors-in-Chief of this journal at the start of 2013, I provocatively titled that piece "Sustainability Management Academics: How's That Going?", implying that academic sustainability management as a profession is a challenging one. And, I mentioned, though barely so, that, in my opinion, one of the aspects of being a successful sustainability management academic, at least from a leadership standpoint, was practicing sustainability, not only in our professional but also in our personal lives. We each have the potential to influence many stakeholders beyond our official research, teaching, and service job responsibilities, including our family members, friends, neighbors, community residents, and even complete strangers whom we happen to meet in the course of our daily lives. A few years before that, I wrote an essay titled "Sustainable Living Beyond 9-to-5" (Starik, 2004) in which I humbly but more directly asserted that to be true to our profession of sustainability management, we needed to practice the principles of that profession outside of our jobs, and I suggested a number of ways some Academy of Management leaders (each associated with the Academy's Organizations and the Natural Environment, or ONE, Division whom I knew personally) were actually trying to do just that. This idea of "personal academic sustainability management" became painfully salient for yours truly when several months ago I accepted an open term (or "continuing") research faculty position with the University of Technology, Sydney, in downtown Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, necessitating a reassessment of all, and a relocation of most, of my worldly belongings from San Francisco, California, where I had been researching and teaching sustainability management at San Francisco State University. That cross-oceanic move inspired me to address this topic in my own personal/professional life in this issue's editorial. Happily, though, as the result of several trips outside Australia, I met two of my friends and veteran ONE colleagues (Kate Kearins and Eva Collins) in New Zealand, had great visits with them, and eventually asked Eva to join me in developing a collaborative guest editorial on the general issue of personal academic sustainability management. [Some of Kate's work was featured in an O&E issue in 2013 (Tregidga, Kearins, & Milne, 2013)]. So, after a brief introduction to the excellent articles in this