Jo Krøjer

The opening chapter discusses ‘social sustainability’ as practice and concept in light of the diverse and transdisciplinary conceptualizations it has undergone since it was famously coined in the Brundtland report in 1990. There is wide agreement that the social dimension of sustainability is the least theorized and prioritized of the three sustainability dimensions (ecological, economic and social) and that there is some conceptual fuzziness surrounding the social dimension. The chapter elaborates the meaning of social sustainability in the initial pursuit of nuanced understandings anchored in research on care, reciprocity, new epistemologies of human-nature relations, and social change. Through the lens of social sustainability, this chapter critically displays and discusses how to understand ecology and economy from a more holistic sustainability perspective, namely by challenging and criticizing economy and particular forms of economic reason and imperatives of growth and efficiency.

Nordic welfare states are often considered to be good examples of social sustainability due to progressive taxing policies, a generous provision of social security and general access to a relatively high standard of welfare services, not least professional care in welfare state institutions like nurseries, kindergartens, and hospital. But if we examine how care is provided and what care giving demands from professional care workers in these welfare state institutions, the picture looks different. In this thorough, empirical analysis of care and care work in the Danish welfare state we show how important resources for care – emotions and relations – are subject to systematic impoverishment. The Marxist notion of impoverishment serves as an analytical tool that sheds new light on the social sustainability of the Danish welfare state and reveals an unsustainable system that does not allow for professionals to recover emotionally and practice self-care. Instead, the work life of care professionals is full of relations with people in need of a care that is impossible for the care professionals to provide sufficiently. With this analysis, the chapter focuses on the emotional aspects of social sustainability.

This book offers a unique, critical exploration of concepts and practices of social sustainability through both a critical concept analysis as well as empirical studies of practices that undermine social sustainability. It addresses the questions: What is the main role of social relations and social practice in the transition from fundamentally unsustainable societies and local practices towards a sustainable future? And how does economical sustainability reduce or enhance social sustainability? The chapters in this work define and understand social sustainability in relation to principles such as solidarity, community, welfare, reciprocity, and regenerative co-existence. These principles are analyzed through the lens of emotions, respect, carefulness, sensitivity, and art, to establish counter-principles and narratives to principles like growth, efficiency, capitalism, and mastery of nature. Such counter-narratives to mainstream understandings and histories of economy aid in shedding light on a variety of different aspects of sustainability. The book presents a methodological plurality including conceptual and empirical approaches, praxis-oriented and inductive approaches. The chapters present interdisciplinary approaches concerning welfare, ecology, sociology, organization and economy, social psychology and aesthetics and therefore appeal to a broad audience of scholars and academics.

Many different professionals play a key role in maintaining welfare in a welfare society. These professionals engage in moral judgements when using (new) technologies. In doing so, they achieve that radical responsibility towards the other that Levinas describes as being at the very core of ethics. Also, professionals try to assess the possible consequences of the involvement of specific technologies and adjust their actions in order to ensure ethical responsibility. Thus, ethics is necessary in order to obtain and sustain one's professionalism. This presents care institutions with the challenge to design work processes and technology work in ways that include a sense of ‘the Other’ and make moral judgement an indispensable part of professional competence in technology. This article provides new understandings of the way ethics are involved in care institutions. Nurses’ moral judgements are sophisticated with regard to ethical perspectives. In hospitals, nurses combine Latour's notion of symmetry in human/technology relations with an ethics implying ethical priority to human beings over other beings. This combination of ethics is not only sophisticated; it is also paradoxical, as it puts together mutually contradictory ethics. Instead of causing moral confusion, this ethical paradox is employed to produce a particularly refined notion of care situations, allowing nurses’ care to include patients and technology alike.