The Affective Associations of The Sustainable Development Concept in the Romanian Cultural Space

Our paper presents the results of an empirical research that was conducted last year in the Romanian business environment. The analyzed corpus comprises approximately 2000 associations of the sustainable development concept, all provided by 627 respondents (employees in the Romanian business environment whose main interest is to use information technology properly in order to create new paradigms and values that will help contribute to a more affluent, creative and harmonious society). The main aim of this paper is to analyse how the employees from the Romanian business environment grasp the concept of sustainable development and relate to it, firstly, on the linguistic level and secondly, on the cultural level. The point of departure is the standpoint that the sustainable development concept is based upon three main pillars: environment, economy and society and it focuses on social sub-themes. Within this framework, we consider cultural diversity and intercultural understanding through language and its infinite association possibilities. Through language, the individual relates to certain concepts and this is done affectively. Therefore, the concept related approach is not univocal, but it involves both positive (e.g., future, environment, education, growth, resources, recycle, responsibility, health, nature) and negative associations (e.g., climate change, global warming, compromise, poverty) which are always culturally conditioned.

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