Monday SoSus musing

In my continued efforts to wrap my head around Social Sustainability, I am currently ploughing through a book that seems to have all the answers and aspects of it covered:

Thankfully, it's a total dream to read! Beautifully clear prose and good illustrations of sociological structures that the different ideas operate within. Since SoSus is a pretty big bite to swallow in and of itself, this book does the favour of chunking the umbrella term down into more reasonably sized aspects of what it takes to create work systems where people want to stay, can develop and use their skills to greatest effect.

Also, one important thing this book does is to explore the subject on stratified levels of personal concern (What the hell does that mean??) - meaning that it looks at what SoSus means on the levels of individuals, teams, enterprises and societies. Those levels each have their own value sets and goals (e.g. the individual may hold personal health, life balance and career development in highest esteem; an enterprise/company may be focusing on reducing personnel turnover costs, recruiting and retaining superior knowledge resources, and having a good and symbiotic relationship with its surrounding community; and the society may focus most heavily on SoSus aspects such as keeping as many people employed and in good health as possible).

Another thing that tickles me is that one chapter is exclusively devoted to the social sustainability prerequisites of Chinese workers - this is something that my colleagues and I sometimes end up speculating in (thowing in the odd, out-of-context statistics we may have snapped up along the way) but probably none of us knows very much about the general context of working there. I haven't gotten further than skimming but it looks promising. One section is about the situation for professionally working women and how their working conditions are affected by the one-child policy and the cultural views on how to maintain a successful career. (I'll be getting back to that in a future post for sure).

Finally - it's a book written by a bunch of cross-disciplinary researchers who wrestle with the same methodological challenges as me (i.e. = convincing other scientific disciplines you're not just producing crap research because you can't plot it all out in graphs) - so each chapter has a small defense-of-chosen-method-section. I think that in itself will leverage a huge chunk of learning for me :)

If any of my thesis workers or PhD students are reading - guess what I'll be bringing up time and time again the next 4 years... ;)