A Self-Determined Pursuit of Personal, Organizational, and Planetary Flourishin

Sustainability is a systems property that refers to the flourishing of the whole. The flourishing of parts (individuals) and the flourishing of larger wholes (organizations, societies, and our planet) are paradoxically dependent on and at odds with one another. This dissertation explores how people pursue creating a flourishing world as an expression of their own agency or self-determination and in doing so, create alignment and integration between complex and sometimes competing objectives.;Three papers serve three purposes. The first paper presents self-determination theory as a model for understanding how people take-in`and act on values and concern for others and our planet. It envisions what a self-determined approach to sustainability could look like and suggests that while non-self-determined motivations are most prevalent within today's sustainability discourse, self-determined motivations may be more congruent with producing a flourishing world. The second paper employs a phenomenological analysis to explore the hypothesis that a self-determined approach to sustainability is consistent with higher sustainability performance and provides qualitative examples of self-determined motivations for sustainability. Finally, the third paper uses culturomics to explore at a societal scale, the interest in the pursuit of purpose in life over time as a proxy indicator for our cultural demand to express one's agency toward creating collective good.;Together, these papers begin to show how pursuing societal and planetary flourishing as an expression of one's own self-determination could fulfill an increasing demand for purpose while crafting alignment between the pursuits of personal, organizational, and planetary flourishing.