Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

Interorganizational relationships can generate multiple interrelated paradoxes, with tensions commonly arising between financial and social objectives or the goals of value capture versus value creation. Our empirical investigation of an interorganizational buyer-supplier relationship along a global value chain explores how power dynamics affect different organizational actors’ experiences of such tensions and how these hinder or enable joint efforts to respond to paradoxes effectively. Our analysis contributes to theory by elucidating the central role of power dynamics in determining both the relative salience of paradoxical tensions and the collective capacity of organizations to leverage paradoxes as a source of innovation. We demonstrate how acknowledging interdependence and striving for participatory interaction are essential for developing an integrated interorganizational paradox-measurement apparatus that facilitates collective recognition of paradoxical tensions and thereby enables coordinated action to harness the potential of such tensions for fuelling joint innovation.

Municipal utilities (MUs) are characterized by a multiplicity of values stemming from the private and public spheres. MUs must comply with the business logic but their orientation towards the common good implies that they are also stewards of the public interest and therefore also have to comply with regulations safeguarding it. Today’s MUs’ public value (PV)-creation is more and more linked to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To move beyond mere symbolism and genuinely incorporate the SDGs, effective management controls are fundamental to steer MUs’ PV-creation. We investigate how public values drive MUs’ SDG efforts and shape their management control practices (MCPs). Embedded in the literature on the values of MUs and institutional logics, our qualitative study explores the drivers for SDG implementation and the MCPs of 16 Austrian and German MUs. We systematize the drivers for MUs’ efforts towards sustainable development according to community, business and compliance logic, and illustrate MUs’ efforts in realizing the SDGs through projects that fill them with life. Our findings also underscore the relevance of PV expressed and mediated by their local owners’ sustainability city strategies to all types of MCPs (of which cultural, cybernetic, and administrative controls are most prominent). In sum, many MUs show a long-term commitment towards PV-creation as stewards of the public interest by providing vital services and promoting the SDGs, although they have to balance their pioneer engagement with the business logic and the revenue expectations of their owners.

The transition towards a sustainable society requires not only the consideration of stakeholders beyond organisational boundaries, but active collaboration between businesses and non-commercial stakeholders. All too often, such multi-stakeholder collaborations for sustainable development get mired in conflict around goal incongruences, incompatible value creation logics, or governance mechanisms. The root-cause for such conflicts lies so deep, that it is often overlooked: collectively held and large unquestioned cultural frames which shape those deepest moral convictions and political principles which structure a worldview (Lakoff 2006a, 2006b). Yet, differences at the level of worldviews are responsible for much conflict and debate in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. To advance our understanding how deep-seated cultural frames influence organisational responses in multi-stakeholder initiatives for sustainability we adopt the conceptual lens of intercultural organising (Cornwall, 2008; Eversole, 2012) and apply deep frame analysis (Hajer, 2006; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005) to learnings from an extraordinary case study of a collaborative engagement between Indigenous stakeholders and a large multi-national mining company in the Pilbara region in Western Australia. Tasked with examining how the already business-community collaborations can deliver better social outcomes for local communities, we uncovered that unaddressed intercultural conflicts were the root-cause of detrimental consequences that affected all parties involved. While this case study from remote Western Australia appears to have very little connection with challenges of sustainability transitions in Central Europe, it carries relevant implications. The learnings from the Pilbara case study build an important knowledge base as Indigenous wisdom invites reflexivity (Husted, 2021; Yunkaporta, 2019) and points to the importance of fostering relationship, responsibility, reciprocity in management thinking (Pio & Waddock, 2020), all of which are needed for transitioning towards a sustainable society.

Environmental issues are the focus of growing political, societal, and economic debates and have become a major concern for the future of young adolescents. Therefore, we analyze how this growth in environmental awareness affects adolescents’ occupational choices. Drawing on job ad texts as data, we calculate a “greenness score” for apprenticeship training occupations, i.e., the respective occupation’s potential for serving environmental protection. We then match this greenness score to occupational choices of adolescents observed in process-generated from Yousty.ch, Switzerland’s largest job board for apprenticeship positions. Using the location and timing of Fridays for Future strikes as a measure for local shocks in environmental awareness, we analyze whether adolescents living in the catchment area of a strike apply to occupations with higher greenness scores after the strike took place. Very preliminary results indicate that adolescents indeed react to the strikes by applying to occupations with higher greenness scores. The results of our paper will be important for policymakers and firms who aim at reducing skill shortages across industries.

Corporate sustainability includes the 'lower' concepts of corporate social responsibility and the triple bottom line. Responsibility to whom is broadly stated as responsibility for shareholders or society, becoming more all-encompassing towards the high level of ambition and implementation efforts of ‘corporate sustainability’. How the all-encompassing ambition inherent in ‘responsibility’ for society, shareholders, or stakeholders in CSR or ‘corporate sustainability’ might manifest itself in research agendas or at the sustainability ambition and implementation efforts of sectors remains unclear. This empirical qualitative study addresses tensions and gaps on ‘responsibility’ in the strategic sustainability management literature through the case of a multi-disciplinary research group on electronics.