Business practices and sustainability

All kinds of business practices contribute to the ability of organisations to pursue sustainability. Research that addresses specific areas is highlighted here. Practices include, but are not limited to, supply chain management and strategy formulation.

Selected research in this theme

• Dr Alona Armstrong's research and innovation activities focuses on understanding the interactions between renewable energy infrastructure and the hosting ecosystem. She works extensively with stakeholders, and is motivated to ensure her research informs policy and practice.
• Dr Rod Bain is currently based at Aberdeen Business School (Robert Gordon University) where his research and teaching focuses on sustainability transitions and management. His professional background in project management in the creative industries and the environmental and community energy sector contribute to his interest in interdisciplinary issues, particularly the theory and practice of sustainability transitions: how policy-makers and businesses are negotiating them, what future societies and businesses might look like, and how best to nourish the skills and knowledge sustainability practitioners need to lead the change.
• Dr Allan Discua Cruz's work on family wine-producing businesses, and the intersection of sustainable wine production techniques, terroir, and sustainable business strategy. He has also focused on understanding the relevance of sustainability for artisanal chocolate and speciality coffee produced by entrepreneurial families.
• Professor Darren Dalcher utilises Responsible Project Management (RPM) as an important lens for framing professionalism in the context of projects and their long-term impacts. Responsible project management brings aspects of stewardship, responsibility, morality and even spirituality into the ever-growing arena of project work. He is also interested in the use of agile and adaptive development and management methods to affect strategic change through small increments and adjustments, and in improving the link between strategy and execution enabling a more responsive and active management style.
• Dr Dakshina De Silva's research focuses on industrial organisation, environmental and natural resource economics, public policy and regional and urban economics. He has examined environmental justice and migration due to pollution, procurement auctions and policy changes, the effects of university knowledge spillovers on high-tech start-ups, and migration on regional wages, among many other areas. He participated in the UK Government's 'Leveling Up' project as an expert contributor on environmental and energy issues in relation to urban/local economies.
• Dr Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs studies theories of change and sustainable lifestyles. Of particular interest is understanding how businesses, professional practices, and institutional norms can be leveraged to create systemic changes to steer towards more sustainable forms of everyday life.
• Professor Magnus George's expertise covers aquaculture, marine science and deep sea fisheries and associated environmental issues. He has recently completed a GCRF-funded project on subsistence agriculture amongst post-conflict Colombian communities, considering the closeness of ex-guerrilla fighters to their local environment and interactions with NGOs and other local actors around integration into mainstream markets.
• Professor Linda Hendry is leading supply chain management work in the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives (PPiPL) project, and collaborating with researchers in Brazil to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on sustainability in the coffee supply chain.
• Dr Marian Iszatt-White’s research considers the potential disconnect between aspirational theories of leadership (for example, authentic, sustainable and servant leadership) and their fitness for purpose in enabling businesses to tackle the UN’s sustainable development goals. Specifically, she is concerned with the problems of advocacy versus inquiry in leadership research and with the notion of stewardship as constituting a higher order of aspiration.
• Dr Joanne Larty’s research explores the experiences of SME owners and how local/regional networks and knowledge contribute to creating both opportunities and challenges in transitioning to more sustainable and regenerative business practices and business models. Her research also explores the role of Universities in the co-creation of sustainability-related knowledge and knowledge exchange for SMEs and regions.
• Dr Lingxuan Liu’s five-year project on environmental governance, with Nanjing University and the UN Environment Programme investigates new and transitioning mechanisms of governance for sustainability through collaboration across public and private sectors.
• Dr Rebecca Liu works in the fields of market study, digital marketing, social and sustainability innovation and innovation management, informed by over 15 years of commercial experience in managerial positions with leading global organisations.
• Professor Katy Mason adopts a socio-material practices perspective to explore the making of moral markets, working across several different projects with a variety of internal partners. She also contributes to the Mobile Access North Yorkshire project, which creates digital knowledge infrastructures to support sustainable socio-economic flourishing in very rural places.
• Dr Anita Schiller's research focuses on environmental justice, regional effects of natural hazards, migration, carbon footprints and willingness to pay to mitigate climate change, strategic polluting firm entry and exit, and the social impacts of renewable and non-renewable energy industries. She has participated in the U.K. Government's 'Leveling up' project as an expert contributor on environmental and energy issues related to urban/local economies.
• Dr Savita Verma is mainly interested in environmentally sustainable supply chain management; her current research is focused on exploring the perception of supply chain actors to consumer attitudes and behaviours related to the use of plastic packaging. She is working as a Research Associate in the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives (PPiPL) project.
• Dr Zoe Zhu uses ethnography to explore the role of ideology in employee management. She is particularly interested in how corporate missions and values are translated, delivered, and interpreted across cultures. By doing so, she explores ways of cultivating sustainable culture in organisations.