Sustainability embedding seen through a sensemaking lens: Understanding engagement strategies of change agents in companies and chain collaboration

It has become eminently clear that in today’s globalized society, business has taken up the baton to orchestrate its role in a more sustainable world. The literature on sustainability management provides a support system of tools, guidelines, and business models to organize the implementation of sustainability initiatives. This growing attention paid to the management of corporate sustainability has led to a focus on the embedding of the new issues in workplace practices in all departments and in core activities, policies, and processes. The engagement of people on all these levels is a crucial complement to the ‘plannability’ of implementation tools that has been prominent in the management literature. However, engagement is less tangible and harder to pin down. Companies struggle to find common ground on the goals, ambitions, interests, and values of sustainability.
More knowledge is needed on how practitioners collaborate and develop emergent sustainability engagement strategies that incorporate managing intangibility and adaptivity over. Key in this respect is the work of internal change agentswho pull people together and generate support in organizations, chains, and the surrounding networks.
The organizational sensemaking perspective (Karl Weick)is used in this research as a theoretical lens to study how change agents act to help sustainability issues become adopted, understood, and infused with meaning. The theoretical lens is empirically applied to study the change agents’ long-term, social interactions and engagement strategies in single- and multiple-case studies. For each case study, qualitative research methods were developed that suit the emphasis on the social construction of organizational reality.
The sensemaking perspective improved our understanding of the organizational embedding of sustainability as an emergent management process. It also uncovered engagement strategies employed by change agents that helped achieve long-term involvement and ownership of the new mental frameworks of sustainability, both within organizations and beyond them in a chain collaboration.
Overall, the sensemaking lens illustrated how sustainability becomes embedded not as a result of a systematic stepwise approach but by skilfully and adaptively navigating social engagement interactions.
Theoretical contributions are made in four areas. First, the operationalization of the sensemaking perspective contributes in several ways to the detection of emergent engagement strategies that help organize corporate sustainability. Second, this thesis makes contributions that alleviate the bias in the sustainability management literature towards planned implementation approaches. The sensemaking literature is enriched with insights into the development of credibility.
The third contribution focuses on the circumstantial incentives that influence the change agents’ freedom of movement and can facilitate them to engage others in sustainability interpretations. The incentives are levers that authorize bottom-up sensemaking. These levers advance the still limited knowledge on stimuli that drive behavioral change in the sustainability management literature. Fourth, this thesis contributes new insights into the ‘adaptive capacity’ of organizations to respond to sustainability issues. A new focus is contributed here that reveals the important sensemaking role of long-term, continuous interactions and slow-paced adaption of daily organizational routines to diverse local contexts.
This thesis also makes practical contributions, for both change agents and top management.