It is not only our economy that faces an unparalleled challenge from climate change. How we understand our relationships, our identities, and even ourselves as people is also at stake. For instance, in Chapter 4 we explored how businesses attempt to maintain their hegemony over climate politics by synchronising their interests with broader societal principles and building a common identity with like-minded groups and individuals. This involves incorporating citizenship roles and leads to the recalibration of subject positions, such that citizens, in enacting corporate interests, can become active constituents in campaigns, responsible consumers of ‘green’ products and services, ethical employees, and even ecopreneurs.

However, this vision of identity assumes acceptance of roles defined within dominant discourses and diminishes the scope for individual agency and resistance. With this in mind, in this chapter we delve deeper into the identity construction that occurs within corporate responses to climate change, focusing particularly on the activities of those tasked with implementing environmental sustainability initiatives. To what degree are the people at the heart of the business world's engagement with the climate crisis (sustainability specialists) bound by the constraints that the very same engagement routinely seeks to impose?

As an increasingly familiar feature of corporate activity, engaging with climate change has the potential to defy the dominant and privileged discourses of shareholder value and economic expansion. This situates sustainability specialists in a contradictory space in which their positions within organisations are rooted in incongruity and paradox. Navigating the consequent tensions involves assembling a coherent sense of self amid conflicting demands and social situations – a process of ‘identity work’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002).