Lunch bag seminar - Sustainability research at LUBS

Please spend your lunch time with us, bring your tea and sandwich and engage with colleagues about environmental challenges and business.

Register Here

Many colleagues at LUBS are passionate about what research can contribute to greening the economy, stop climate change and help implementing the sustainability developmental goals in economy and society. With this lunch bag series, we want to give you an insight into colleagues’ research and use the opportunity to have some social time while working from home.

Also see: Green Research at LUBS: https://business.leeds.ac.uk/dir-record/research-projects/1705/sustainability-and-green-research

 

Speakers Information

Professor Kerrie Unsworth

Employee CSR Engagement: The Paradoxes of Embedding & Meaning-Making

Literature focusing on micro-foundations of CSR is limited particularly looking across multiple levels of analysis. We therefore asked the question, “How is CSR policy transmitted down the hierarchy of the organisation and how does that transmission affect employee engagement?” This work builds on interviews with 40 employees from two grocery retail organisations and the analysis is ongoing. There are two interesting initial findings that I’ll talk about in this seminar. The first is a paradox of embedding. When CSR was a part of the job, they could not see the social value of their actions, leading to disengagement with organisational CSR. On the other hand, where middle managers had greater autonomy to set up local CSR initiatives (that were not embedded), the meaning and value found in these discretionary behaviours was prominent. Thus, embedding CSR into the “day job” may strip it of its meaning.

Secondly, the middle-managers were the key meaning-makers even though they were not the people making the policy (CSR Director) nor those implementing it (the store assistants). The aspects of organisational CSR that gained traction and were most successfully communicated and embedded at lower levels were those that related to the personal interests and values of the store managers; thus, inconsistencies across stores were noted.

Dr. Zlatko Bodrožić

A system-level perspective on the environmental crisis—what can we learn from Schumpeter and Polanyi?

We face a climate emergency. Climate scientists tell us we have only a decade until feedback and cumulative effects reach a point of no return and we face a crisis in the biosphere and possibly the collapse of civilisation as we know it. An increasing number of scholars sees a contrast between this dire situation and the current state of the field of sustainability in management and organisation studies, which is mainly focused on the firm-level and individual-level behaviour. Efforts to forestall the climate emergency will certainly require changes in business and individual behaviour, but the actions of individual businesses and actors cannot possibly suffice to meet the challenge we face. These threats require radical change in the wider “system” within which organisations and individuals operate. However, there is no consensus on the most adequate frameworks, which could offer guidance for studying this system level. This presentation explores what the work of Schumpeter and Polanyi could contribute to a system-level perspective on the environmental crisis.