Sustainability: a social organization concept concerned with preserving and transforming the world

Abstract

This study presents a semantic analysis of the term ‘sustainability,’ seeking to identify whether one could draw a social project from its use. Assuming the existence of a conceptual vacuity in its use, its semantic projections would be insufficient to structure ‘sustainability’ as an organizing concept of compatible social processes. Hence, sustainability would be constituted within the psychological activity immanent to the historical subject that seeks to interpret their world and explain its preservation and transformation. The research method involved constructing a system of interpretation to designate the semantic forces present when the term is employed. It is not possible to extract a concept of social organization from its use, only transformational theoretical constructions that impose themselves as logical needs that appeal to technoscientific references, as well as a regulating intersubjective element of non-revolutionary socioenvironmental processes