abstract: This dissertation explores the unique role schools play in contributing toward a sustainable future for their communities. This was undertaken by first conducting a thorough review and analysis of the literature on the current utilization of schools as agents of sustainable development, along with an evaluation of schools engaging in this model around the United States. Following this, a framework was developed to aid in the assessment of school-community engagements from the perspective of social change. Sustainability problem solving tools were synthesized for use by schools and community stakeholders, and were tested in the case study of this dissertation. This case study combined methods from the fields of sustainable development, transition management, and social change to guide two schools in their attempts to increase community sustainability through addressing a shared sustainability problem: childhood obesity. The case study facilitated the creation of a sustainable vision for the Phoenix Metropolitan Area without childhood obesity, as well as strategic actions plans for each school to utilize as they move forward on addressing this challenge. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Sustainability 2013

Organizations around the world increasingly publish voluntary sustainability reports. Stakeholders want more information than financial statements, and environmental and social concerns have grown in the past two decades. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework for sustainability reporting is used by most organizations today. This is an analysis of the indicators in the GRI framework used to report on gender equality and diversity. I have used Carol Bacchi's method "What Is the "Problem" Represented to Be?" to discover how the "problems" of gender equality and diversity are presented in the framework and what effects those constructions of the problem might have.

abstract: Employee-owned businesses, benefit corporations, social enterprises, and other sustainability entrepreneurship innovations are responding to challenges such as climate change, economic inequalities, and unethical business behavior. Academic programs to date, however, often fall short in sufficiently equipping students with competencies in sustainability entrepreneurship – from a coherent set of learning objectives, through effective and engaging pedagogies, to rigorous assessment of learning outcomes. This dissertation contributes to bridging these gaps. The first study proposes a process-oriented and literature-based framework of sustainability entrepreneurship competencies. It offers a general vision for students, faculty, and entrepreneurs, as well as for the design of curricula, courses, and assessments. The second study presents an exploration into the nature of sustainability entrepreneurship courses, with a focus on teaching and learning processes. Using pioneering courses at Arizona State University, the study analyzes and compares the links between learning objectives, pedagogies, and learning outcomes. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with course instructors, the study identifies cognitive apprenticeship from input processing to experimentation, constructive alignment from learning objectives to assessments, and curriculum-level coordination across courses as key success factors of sustainability entrepreneurship education. The result of this study can inform instructors and researchers in applying and further substantiating effective educational models for future entrepreneurs. The third study addresses the key question of competence assessment: what are reliable tools for assessing students’ competence in sustainability entrepreneurship? This study developed and tested a novel tool for assessing students’ competence in sustainability entrepreneurship through in-vivo simulated professional situations. The tool was in different settings and evaluated against a set of criteria derived from the literature. To inform educators in business and management programs, this study discusses and concludes under which conditions this assessment tool seems most effective, as well as improvement for future applications of the tool. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2020

The purpose of this single case study was to explore enterprise risk management strategies that nonprofit business leaders used to maintain and improve organizational sustainability. The study population included 3 executive leaders from a rehabilitation and social services nonprofit agency located in the northeastern United States. The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations integrated enterprise risk management framework was the conceptual lens used in this study. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with the 3 executive leaders of the client organization and review of internal, external, and publicly available documents. Data and information from documents and interviews were manually coded. Findings were validated through data triangulation and member checking to help ensure accuracy, consistency, and credibility. Several overarching themes emerged from data analysis related to managing risk for sustainability: a commitment to culture and the mission, vision and values; operational efficiencies to build a financially strong organization; engagement of executive staff and board members; and addressing staffing needs for ongoing operations to meet client needs. Findings from this study might contribute to positive social change by providing nonprofit leaders with enterprise risk management strategies and processes to maintain and improve organizational performance, thereby helping to ensure leaders’ ability to serve and improve their communities.

Problem: A decisive majority of Swedish firms are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and studies indicate that most of these lack, among other things, financial resources, which often limit smaller firms from implementing sustainable practices. Since SMEs compete with larger enterprises, with more established departments and therefore, they cannot strategize their sustainability work to the same extent. The problem emerges when requirements from stakeholders, based on the 2030 agenda, cannot be met due to lacking organizational abilities. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to gain an understanding of how sustainability consultants support SMEs in their sustainable development work. The research, therefore, investigated the practical processes of consultants when they work with SMEs. The varying processes between sustainability consultants will also be investigated, so similarities and differences can be discovered in their processes. Method: The research conducted follows a grounded theory, an exploratory approach, an abductive research design, all under an interpretive philosophy. The primary data collected consists of semi-structured interviews with sustainability consultants in the Jönköping area. Following the grounded theory, this included three stages of analysis namely open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. During selective coding, it is critical to use an abductive design to ground the empirical findings in existing literature and theory. The analyzed findings were thereafter transformed into a proposed model which is supported by both the empirical findings and theory. Conclusion: Sustainability consultants can support SMEs with their knowledge and expertise when developing sustainable business practices in smaller firms. This research also contributes to a proposed model that shows the process for SMEs and further explains how SMEs and consultants can work together to develop strategic goals for regenerative firms. However, it is noted that contextual factors and specific gains in knowledge cannot be conveyed in a model. Although, describing the processes of knowledge transfer using an adaption of agile methodology was found suitable for this study. Conclusively, the model’s success is highly based on contextual factors such as firm maturity and the knowledge of the consultant in the specific field under development.

Leadership is recognized as a crucial element for successfully introducing, implementing andinstitutionalizing change for sustainability. However, it is unclear which purposes, people and processes, regarded as core components of leadership, drive sustainability and how they do it. The objective of this thesis is to investigate how organizational leadership for sustainability can be conceptualized in terms of purposes, people and processes driving sustainability. Addressed research questions are: How is sustainability and leadership viewed and approached by organizational leaders? Which purposes, people and processes drive leadership for sustainability in organizations? How are these purposes, people and processes related in driving leadership for sustainability? To answer these questions, research data has been collected through a case study, primarily through 16 interviews with leaders in different companies who have explicit responsibility for sustainability. The findings suggest that: Purposes that drive leadership for sustainability are many. On an organizational level, a central driver is to meet stakeholder expectations, which in turn may create various business benefits. On an individual level, a core driver is the personal engagement of wanting to do something meaningful by contributing to sustainability and to the personal development of other people. People who drive leadership for sustainability have very mixed backgrounds and are associated with a wide range of abilities and qualities. However, the abilities to coordinate and to shift from silo thinking to systems thinking stand out. Combining generalist competences in systems thinking and coordination with specialist competences within environmental, social and economic dimensions suggests that key competences needed to drive sustainability could be described as M-shaped competences. Processes that drive leadership for sustainability can be described in terms of including elements from a wide range of leadership theories, such as transformational, ethical, shared and emergent leadership. Elements of many different leadership theories seem needed to understand what leadership for sustainability means and how it effectively can be approached. Based on these findings, the overall conclusion is that the 3Ps purposes, people, processes play important roles in driving sustainability. Linking these 3Ps of leadership with the 3Ps of sustainability planet, people, profit into the 6Ps of leadership for sustainability seem to provide a valuable lens or framework for analyzing and understanding organizational leadership for sustainability as it highlights central aspects that seem essential to balance and clarify in order to drive sustainability. / Ledarskap anses vara en avgörande faktor för att framgångsrikt införa, implementera och institutionalisera förändring för hållbarhet. Däremot är det oklart vilka syften, människor och processer, betraktade som centrala delar av ledarskap, som driver hållbarhet och hur de gör det. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur ledarskap för hållbarhet i organisationer kankonceptualiseras i termer av syften, människor och processer som driver hållbarhet. Studiens forskningsfrågor är: Hur uppfattas hållbarhet och ledarskap av ledare i organisationer? Vilka syften, människor och processer driver ledarskap för hållbarhet i organisationer? Hur är dessa syften, människor och processer relaterade i att driva ledarskap för hållbarhet? För att besvara dessa frågor har forskningsdata samlats in genom en fallstudie, främst genom 16 intervjuer med ledare i olika företag som har ett uttalat ansvar för hållbarhet. Resultaten tyder på att: Syftena som driver ledarskap för hållbarhet är många. På organisationsnivå är en central drivkraft att möta intressentförväntningar, vilket i sin tur kan skapa olika typer av  affärsnytta. På individnivå är en central drivkraft det personliga engagemanget att vilja göra något meningsfullt genom att bidra till hållbar utveckling och till andra människors personliga utveckling. Människorna som driver ledarskap för hållbarhet har mycket blandade bakgrunder och är förknippade med ett brett spektrum av förmågor och egenskaper. Men förmågan att  amordna och att gå från sil tänkande till systemtänkande sticker ut. En kombination av generalistkompetenser inom systemtänkande och samordning med specialistkompetenser inom miljömässiga, sociala och ekonomiska dimensioner tyder på att en nyckelkompetens som behövs för att driva hållbarhet skulle kunna beskrivas som M-formade kompetenser. Processerna som driver ledarskap för hållbarhet kan beskrivas i termer av bland annat element från ett brett spektrum av ledarskapsteorier, såsom transformerande, etiskt, delat  ch framväxande ledarskap. Element från många olika ledarskapsteorier verkar behövas för att förstå vad ledarskap för hållbarhet innebär och hur det effektivt kan drivas. Baserat på dessa iakttagelser så är den övergripande slutsatsen att syften, människor, processer spelar en viktig roll i att driva en hållbar utveckling. Att länka dessa tre delar av ledarskap (eng. 3Ps purposes, people, processes) med de tre delarna av hållbarhet (eng. 3 Ps people, planet, profit) i ledarskap för hållbarhet (eng. 6Ps of leadership for sustainability) verkar vara en värdefull lins eller ram för att analysera och förstå ledarskap för hållbarhet i organisationer eftersom det belyser centrala aspekter som verkar vara viktiga för att balansera och driva hållbarhet.

Purpose The purpose of the thesis is to contribute toward establishing the relationship between the concepts of sustainability reporting, sustainability performance, and sustainability reputation.This will be done by investigating the causal relationships between these concepts and whether those relationships are negative or positive. Methodology The study is based on a positivistic philosophy with a deductive approach. By using a quantitative method and a longitudinal design, the causal influences from the independent variables in 2019 to the dependent variables in 2020 could be investigated in a sample of 99 companies. This was done by 297 firm-year observations for measuring sustainability performance, and by 198 firm-year observations for measuring sustainability reputation and sustainability reporting respectively. Secondary data from the agency SB Insight together with primary data from companies’ sustainability reports and annual reports were mainly tested by a multiple linear regression model. Findings The findings show that sustainability reporting is negatively affected by sustainability performance and indicate that the causality is unilateral from sustainability performance tosustainability reporting. Sustainability reputation is positively affected by sustainability reporting, but sustainability reporting is in addition positively affected by sustainability reputation, indicating a bidirectional relationship where the causality remains unsolved. The findings show no significant association between sustainability performance and sustainability reputation. Furthermore, the thesis suggests a new concept to the research field, namely the reporting-reputation-spiral. Theoretical Perspectives The study analyzed the results through the legitimacy theory, the stakeholder theory, the voluntary disclosure theory, and the signal theory

No description available.

The purpose of this research study is to focus on the idolization and pitfalls of sustainable entrepreneurship, the study aims to highlight the challenges, gaps, and key barriers that hinder sustainable entrepreneurship in start-ups and small enterprises (SSEs). Examine the idolization of sustainable entrepreneurship and its potential implications on entrepreneurial decision-making and risk perception. METHODOLOGY: The thesis is based on a mixed research method centred around Drivhuset Borås collected data over the span of 7,5 years, whereas the last two years includes evaluations on sustainable entrepreneurship. The collected data is collected from the company’s operating reports between the year 2016 and 2022, as well as from their in-house material, such as lecture material. Since the operating report for 2023 still is in progress the researcher was able to get access to the collected statistics for January to April 2023. FINDINGS: This study provides examples of the impact key barriers and challenges faced by the start-ups and small enterprises have for effect. It has become obvious that, even though organisations such as Drivhuset Borås aim to educate and counsel individuals, the barriers and challenges are a persisting problem. There is a significant amount of research on business sustainability, which covers topics connected to the social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability.

Our world faces environmental and socio-cultural problems that will impact young children in the long term. Therefore it is important to advance research in the field of Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) to support educators in working alongside young children, families, and communities toward a more sustainable future. The purpose of my study was to create professional development to support educators in engaging in ECEfS with the children in their care. The participants were 14 early childhood educators who worked with young children between the ages of 1.5 and 5 years old. My study was grounded in social constructivist theory and systems theory, and was informed by the work of influential scholars in ECEfS. I adopted a complex mixed methods design that consisted of four research phases. In Phase 1, I collected qualitative and quantitative data about the educators' ECEfS previous knowledge and practices by means of the adapted Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood and interviews. In Phase 2, I merged the qualitative and quantitative data, created and implemented ECEfS professional development, and let 2 months pass for the educators to apply the strategies learned in the professional development. In Phase 3, I conducted a second implementation of the scale and a second round of interviews. In Phase 4, I performed a final merged interpretation of the data. Results of the study indicated that some of the educators' ECEfS reported practices improved slightly after the professional development while other ECEfS practices decreased due to strict COVID-19 restrictions. Although the modest improvements in the educators' ECEfS practices after the professional development point to the need for a deeper and broader engagement with ECEfS, the educators' reported engagement with ECEfS also provided evidence about the importance of professional dialogues, reflective practices, and loose parts as mediums to engage in ECEfS. A key implication is that some ECEs are engaging in ECEfS despite not labeling their practices as such.