Companies as Drivers of Sustainability Transformations

This PhD project uses evidence-based interventions to investigate the incubating and scaling of sustainability entrepreneurship and its effect on transforming the business environment. It researches the link between sustainability entrepreneurship and place-based socio-ecological transformations as well as entrepreneurs’ active engagement in response to adverse events and their contribution to the resilience of socio-economic systems. It applies a mixed-method approach including quantitative and qualitative methods.

This project examines how companies can act as drivers of sustainability transformations through joint and interactive decision-making among organisational stakeholders. It focuses on how psychological states—particularly sustainability mindsets—influence key aspects of decision-making processes. These include the assessment of the attainability and desirability of sustainability goals, the evaluation of necessary trade-offs to achieve these goals, and the mental contrasting of internal versus external costs and benefits. Particular attention is given to how such decision dynamics unfold under challenging conditions, including economic, socio-political, or environmental crises and the associated conflicts of interest. Methodologically, the project employs surveys, vignette experiments, and negotiation simulations to trace how sustainability-oriented decisions are formed, negotiated, and implemented within companies.

This PhD project examines how organizations can drive sustainability transformations by becoming radically distinct from prevailing market norms. It explores why and how some organizations choose to dismantle their own successful yet unsustainable business models to lead broader market shifts toward sustainability. Drawing on theories from strategic management, innovation, and organization studies, the project investigates the mechanisms that enable organizations to maintain legitimacy while radically differentiating themselves. Methodologically, the project draws on qualitative research methods, such as in-depth case studies and/or comparative case studies.

This PhD project analyses how companies can foster sustainable consumption practices among consumers. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the role of business models such as repair, refill or access-based consumption. These business models require understanding how consumption practices change and how new practices spread. The project may draw on various psychological, economic, or sustainability science concepts to examine how sustainable routines are shaped and how new sustainable practices diffuse. A quantitative methodological approach of the project is expected, which explores barriers, enabling conditions, and strategies to foster the adoption of sustainable consumption practices.

This scholarship is intended to examine the complex, often paradoxical relationship between digitalization and corporate sustainability. While digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for environmental monitoring, resource optimization, and stakeholder engagement, they also reshape how organizations understand, measure, and act upon sustainability challenges. Key research directions that scholarship holders might pursue: 

• Digital affordances for sustainability: You investigate how digital technologies enable new forms of sustainability management, including real-time environmental monitoring, supply chain transparency, circular economy platforms, and stakeholder collaboration tools.
• Epistemological shifts: You may critically examine how the datafication of nature and sustainability transforms organizational sensemaking. When complex socio-ecological realities are reduced to quantifiable metrics and algorithmic decision rules, what forms of sustainability knowledge are privileged or marginalized?
• Digital Responsibility: You explore how and when firms act responsibly amid  the unintended negative consequences of digitalization for sustainability, including the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure, the social impacts of automation and AI, and the potential for "digital greenwashing" where sophisticated sustainability reporting masks limited substantive change.

This PhD fellowship offers an opportunity to engage in cutting-edge research at the intersection of stakeholder theory and sustainability management. It analyses how stakeholder theory mindsets of managers enable transforming the business environment. To do so, this project will use quantitative research methods to explore whether managers with a stronger stakeholder theory mindset contribute to sustainability transformations in organizations and industries. By advancing our understanding of stakeholder theory mindsets, this research aims to provide actionable insights for business leaders and policymakers seeking to foster sustainability transformations. The findings will contribute to the academic discourse on stakeholder theory and provide empirical evidence on its practical implications for sustainable business practices.