Translating social sustainability into practice: an illusion of control

The purpose of this paper is to understand why and how the concept of social sustainability evolves over time by generating a gap between the initially desired strategy and the daily practices at the city level. An extensive ethnographic study was conducted within the city of Gothenburg. Through the lens of Actor Network Theory, findings reveal that the translation of a city strategy aimed at ensuring social sustainability depends on how the actors involved at various organisational levels interpret the concept of social sustainability and work to translate
it into performance measurement practices. Such translation takes different directions and may lead to a transformation of the concept itself that becomes foggier, and thus less measurable, over time.