Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) as ideological apparatuses: Sustainability and the new hegemony in emerging markets

This article critically examines the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility; Environmental, Social, and Governance frameworks; and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in emerging markets. While often presented as neutral instruments of ethical business and sustainable development, we argue that these frameworks function as Sustainability Ideological State Apparatuses that embed, naturalize, and reproduce dominant ideologies under the guise of responsible management. Drawing on theory of ideology and theory of hegemony, we show how organizations are positioned as compliant sustainability subjects, while Western-centric norms are legitimized and internalized—often at the expense of local priorities, capacities, and epistemologies. This process constitutes a form of ideological colonization, wherein global sustainability standards displace alternative models rooted in local knowledge systems. This study illustrates how small and medium-sized enterprises in the Global South resist, reinterpret, and reconfigure these frameworks through contextually grounded practices. Our analysis contributes to Management Learning by reframing sustainability as a contested space of power, knowledge, and resistance. We call for more reflexive, decolonial approaches to organizational learning that foreground local agency and critically interrogate the ideological undercurrents embedded in global sustainability discourse.