How Espoused Values Generate and Stabilize Horizontal Governance, Sustaining Language Justice as Social Sustainability in a Civil Society Organization : An Intrinsic Single-Case Study

Sammanfattning

This study investigates how espoused values within a Swedish civil society organization (CSO) generate horizontal governance to sustain language justice as a form of social sustainability. It addresses the corporate bias in sustainability culture theory and the organizational-level gap in language justice scholarship, examining how internal structures enable the sustained pursuit of linguistic equity. Adopting an intrinsic single-case study design, the research triangulated data from five semi-structured interviews, participant observation sessions, and internal organizational documents. The analysis followed a two-phase sequential process: narrative analysis to preserve the integrity of individual members’ accounts and reflexive thematic analysis to construct organizational-level themes. The findings reveal that members’ values regarding democratic participation and collective process function as both the philosophical foundation and the active operational guide for the CSO’s horizontal governance. These structures sustain the organization’s capacity to pursue language justice by maintaining ideological coherence and fostering a collective agency that resists coercive isomorphism. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that the values-governance-mission relationship is mutually reinforcing: values produce the governance structure, which sustains the mission, which in turn reaffirms the founding values. This identifies horizontal governance not merely as a structural choice, but as a constitutive practice of social sustainability.