https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503211015914 Business & Society 1–40 © The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/00076503211015914 journals.sagepub.com/home/bas Moving Beyond Sisyphus: Pursuing Sustainable Development in a Business-as-Usual World Sarah Easter 1 , Kim Ceulemans 2 , and Monty L. Lynn 1 Abstract How do actors cope when their repeated efforts to bring change seem futile? In this qualitative study, we consider sustainable development initiatives within a U.S. higher education institution where repeated efforts by actors led to nominal change. We focus on understanding how actors sought to enact sustainable development initiatives in the face of an unresponsive context, that is, in a context characterized by pressures to maintain the status quo. We show how actors’ attempts to embed sustainable development practices into the university represent a dynamic process, characterized by periods of persistence and suspension. Our theorizing reveals that actors used three coping mechanisms to maintain focus on their sustainability goals: community building, resourcefulness, and vision. By emphasizing these dimensions of their initiatives, actors’ emotional response is focused on encouragement and hope to persist in a context that is largely unresponsive to sustainable development. Our study contributes to the sustainability literature by explicating how actors develop resilience in their efforts to pursue sustainable development in unresponsive contexts. Keywords higher education institutions, resilience, resistance to change, sustainable development 1 Abilene Christian University, College of Business Administration, TX, USA 2 TBS Business School, Department of Management Control, Accounting and Auditing, Toulouse, France Corresponding Author: Sarah Easter, College of Business Administration, Abilene Christian University, 254 Mabee Business Building, ACU Box 29300, Abilene, TX 79699, USA. Email: sge02a@acu.edu Original Manuscript - Full Length 1015914BAS XX X 10.1177/00076503211015914Business & SocietyEaster et al. research-article 2021