Scaling sustainability from the organizational periphery to the strategic core : towards a practice-based framework of what practitioners “do”
Abstract
This paper explores what sustainability managers do when attempting to scale sustainability to a strategic level within their organization. Drawing on semistructured interview data with 44 sustainability managers in large, for‐profit companies, we identify three distinct scaling microstrategies that individuals use when scaling sustainability. We label these conforming, leveraging, and shaping. Our analysis also finds that sustainability managers deploy combinations of these microstrategies in three distinct approaches, which we call the assimilation approach, the mobilization approach, and the transition approach. Finally, we interrogate the degree to which employing these different approaches achieves a peripheral, intermediate, or strategic scale of sustainability within the organizations represented in the study. Our paper contributes to theory and practice at the interface of strategy and sustainability by developing a practice‐based Scaling Approach Framework, whereby an assimilation approach is associated with organizations with sustainability at a peripheral scale, a mobilization approach is associated with an intermediate scale of sustainability, and a transition approach is associated with scaling sustainability to a strategic level. From these results, we propose a Scaling Progression Model that reflects the phases that individuals progress through when scaling sustainability.
Citation
Birrell Ivory , S & Mackay , R B 2020 , ' Scaling sustainability from the organizational periphery to the strategic core : towards a practice-based framework of what practitioners “do” ' , Business Strategy and the Environment , vol. 29 , no. 5 , pp. 2058-2077 . https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.2487
Publication
Business Strategy and the Environment
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1099-0836Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.2487
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