Sustainability in Business (SUB)

Thursday 27.4, 11.30-12.30
Ekonominaukio 1, U213

Patrick Shulist, Aalto University School of Business

Can I Sell You Avocadoes and Talk to You About Contraception? Well, It Depends Which Comes First: Anchor Roles and Asymmetric Boundaries  

Role theory generally predicts that when the demands and norms of two roles are highly contrasted, individuals will construct a strong boundary to separate the roles. However, such predictions are grounded primarily in the Global North, emphasizing role pairings such as ‘work-family’ and hybrid ‘work-work.’ Comparatively, the Global South is characterized by a relative lack of public services that creates a highly contrasted, highly salient, and yet understudied role pairing – ‘work-community.’ Additionally, the socioeconomic features of the Global South (e.g., dense and overlapping community networks, financial poverty) call into question whether existing predictions surrounding boundary strength are likely to hold. We conducted a qualitative study of 73 Tanzanian participants who had both a self-employed work role and a family planning counsellor community role. We found that highly contrasted roles can be simultaneously perceived as both incompatible and compatible. Specifically, the boundaries we observed were neither uniformly strong nor weak, but rather of asymmetric strength: strong when a social interaction was anchored in the community role, but weak when anchored in the work role. The specific role contrasts we identify, and the importance of role anchoring we observe, have important implications for role theory and literature on boundary setting more broadly.

Thursday 16.2, 11.30-12.30
Ekonominaukio 1, U213

Iana Nesterova, Aalto University School of Business

Degrowth and the circular economy

A recent critical realist redefinition of degrowth calls for a more nuanced approach to the concept of degrowth itself as well as to various social entities and their degrowth transformations. This redefinition encourages thinking about degrowth in terms of both less and more and about degrowth transformations on the four planes of social being (material transactions with nature, social relationships between people, social structures, people’s inner being). Considering this redefinition, we contemplate what it means for business transformations and for the study thereof. In this paper, we zoom in on circularity as a manifestation of a sustainability practice in business and as an example of a useful principle widely acknowledged as desirable by business sustainability scholars. We relate circularity with each of the planes of social being, focusing in particular on the plane of people’s inner being where causality may reside.

Thursday 2.2, 11.30-12.30
Ekonominaukio 1, U213

Iqra Khan,Aalto University School of Business

Customer-enforced sustainability

During the seminar, Iqra will explain differentiating the customer-centric vs customer-enforced sustainability and the potential challenges/limitations the later causes to the manufacturing factories located in Pakistan. In brief, while customer-centricity focuses on customer as dominant entity for value co-creation in supply chain, customer enforcement  frame them as the decision makers/controllers of the whole supply-network process. This study is based on qualitative research design followed by two rounds of data collection, analyzing 16 textile manufacturing factories operating in 3 industrial districts ( Gadoon (KPK), Lahore, Faisalabad) of Pakistan. The first round of research visit to factories is used to understand the thoughts and feelings of the research participants (23) regarding sustainability which further enabled an understanding of the actual research problem ascribed to participant’s experiences through informal conversations and observations. A major finding during the first research visit was that all the sustainability criteria are defined by the customers (brands as customers) .The customers define and list the suppliers in the whole value chain starting from yarn suppliers to the carton suppliers for packaging. However, this kind of customer-centricity leads to certain challenges for the factories such as losing control, lacking sustainability mindset from within the organization and raises the question of responsibility, fulfillment of whose business objectives and biased orientation which further connects to various economic, environmental and social sustainability aspects. As the respondents pointed to some of the difficulties, they face to meet the sustainability criteria, we plan to conduct second round of data collection in February 2023 where we seek to explore the challenges this type of customer-driven sustainability requirements bring for the geographically distanced and contextually different manufacturing factories  and the potential ways to eliminate these differences.

Thursday 24.11, 11.30-12.30
Ekonominaukio 1, U213

Samuli Patala¹, Laura Albareda², Minna Halme¹
(1) Aalto University School of Business, (2) Lappenranta University of Technology

Story of a paper: "Polycentric Governance of Privately Owned Resources in Circular Economy Systems"

This seminar will recount the story of the paper "Polycentric Governance of Privately Owned Resources in Circular Economy Systems," winner of the Carolyn Dexter Award for international papers at the 2018 Academy of Management conference and recently published in the Journal of Management Studies.

Tuesday 8.11, 14.30-15.30
Ekonominaukio 1, U213
*Space is limited, so please email [email protected] if you plan to attend.*

Maria de Villa Correa, Professor of Strategy at Universidad EAFIT and visiting professor at Aalto University
Discussant: Lea Rankinen, Director, Sustainability & Public Affairs at Paulig Group

Developing adaptation strategies to climate change: The Colombian National Federation of Coffee Growers

Management research has focused on understanding how firms develop strategies for the marketplace. However, we still know less about how organizations develop strategies to confront grand challenges like climate change. Hence, we explore the case of the Colombian National Federation of Coffee Growers, that is a leader in coffee growth research and one of the largest rural NGOs in the world, to improve our understanding of how organizations develop adaptation strategies to climate change. In this session, we will share initial insights derived from our empirical data (sustainability reports, interviews at different organizational levels, and ethnographic field work). Attendees will gain knowledge about an interesting case on adaptation strategies to climate change and we hope to receive feedback on the theoretical lenses that could potentially guide our further data analysis.

Alfred Kordelin Prize for key future actors who have created the conditions for a stronger, diverse, and sustainable society as well as a better future, 2022

Article "When Is There a Sustainability Case for CSR? Pathways to Environmental and Social Performance Improvements" (co-authored with Jukka Rintamäki and Jette Steen Knudsen) received Business & Society’s 2020 Best Paper Award

Finalist for the EGOS Best Student Paper Award with the paper “Risk organization and moral multiplexity in the EU biofuels market” (presented at EGOS Edinburgh 2019)

HSE Support Foundation Societal Impact Award, 2019

Thesis "Trash to Treasure: A Multiple Case Study of Finnish Companies That Create Economic Value from Waste Materials" received award for top university master's thesis, Association for Environmental Management (Ymparistöjohtamisen yhdistys ry), 2018

Article "Polycentric Governance of Privately Owned Resources in Circular Economy Systems" received Carolyn Dexter Award for international papers, Academy of Management 2018

Article "Powering sustainable innovations: Strategies for collaborating with deviant partners" won Best Academic Paper at R&D Management Conference 2016, University of Cambridge

Article "Innovation for Inclusive Business: Intrapreneurial Bricolage in Multinational Corporations", Journal of Management Studies, 2012 received the Emerald Citations of Excellence for 2015

Väre, Otaniementie 14
02150 Espoo

Elizabeth Miller
[email protected]