Sustainability as a Mediating Construct: Connection, Evaluative Openness, and the Risk of Capture

ABSTRACT

Similar sustainability commitments can become organizationally consequential in markedly different ways, yet the relational architecture producing this variation remains under‐theorized. This conceptual paper theorizes sustainability as a mediating construct through representational, projective, and organizing forms. Recursive translation explains how changes within one form feed back into the others, generating varying degrees of connection. Because connection does not determine which sustainability claims retain capacity to challenge and revise mediation, the framework introduces evaluative openness as a second, analytically independent dimension. Their intersection yields four configurations: symbolic, exploratory, embedded, and captured sustainability. The embedded–captured distinction reveals the central implication: strongly connected mediation can sustain coordinated action while the range of values, actors, evidence, and possible futures capable of redirecting that mediation progressively narrows. By separating connection from evaluative openness, the framework extends research on decoupling, hybrid organizing, and performativity and explains why organizational incorporation alone does not establish transformative capacity.