Process and Configurational Perspectives in Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

The collection of manuscripts submitted as habilitation in management science outlines a research agenda towards more process and configurational research in corporate sustainability. The habilitation thesis is structured in three sections. Section 1 contains five empirical studies that each offer a unique process and configurational perspective on issues of managerial relevance in corporate sustainability. These studies draw on various empirical datasets (e.g., textual documents, interviews, archival analysis, expert workshops) and adopt different research methodologies (e.g., systematic reviews, in-depth case study, comparative case study, process methods). Together, they offer new theoretical insights about the processes through which companies more effectively benefit from sustainable technologies and become more sustainable over time. Section 2 contains four empirical articles that illustrate the opportunities of configurational theory and methods at the individual-, project-, organizational-, and systems-level. While the articles in Section 2 do not explicitly relate to sustainability research, they all contribute to research fields in management (e.g., innovation system, effective policy interventions, managerial commitment) that are highly relevant for sustainability research. In so doing, the articles in Section 2 indirectly inform research on corporate sustainability and directly illustrate the opportunities of configurational research in corporate sustainability. Section 3 includes three articles that develop new methodological approaches for studying organizational phenomena from a configurational-multilevel and comparative configurational process perspective. Both process and configurational research methods are comparably young methods in management sciences. The manuscripts in Section 3 contribute to this growing field of methodological research by offering systematic approaches and advice to research seeking to conduct rigorous process and configurational research in corporate sustainability.