To Infinity and Beyond The Quarterly Report

Sammanfattning

Sustainability decisions are assumed to activate more long-term reasoning because they involve distant consequences and intertemporal trade-offs. At the same time, prior research remains divided between treating temporal orientation as a stable individual characteristic and viewing it as shaped by organizational context and situational demands. What remains unclear is whether the same individual reasons differently about time depending on the decision being evaluated. This study addresses that question through a within-person comparative design. Drawing on eleven semi-structured interviews with decision-makers in the Nordic fashion industry, it compares how the same individuals evaluated a sustainability decision and a conventional business decision using Emirbayer and Mische's (1998) chordal triad. The findings show that temporal reasoning shifted within individuals, but not consistently toward sustainability decisions. Instead, long-horizon reasoning was more strongly associated with the intertemporal structure of the decision itself, while organizational scaffolding shaped whether such reasoning could be sustained. The study shifts attention from sustainability as a domain to the structural conditions that make future-oriented reasoning possible.