Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST)

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https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/126537
This department was formerly known as Centre for Complex Systems in Transition

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Browsing Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) by browse.metadata.advisor "Feront, Cécile"

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    Change contagion : exploring the role that social interactions play in increasing support for corporate sustainability
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-03) van Achterbergh, Elzé; Feront, Cécile; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Centre for Sustainability Transition
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: Pressure is mounting for businesses to shift towards sustainability by serving nature and society. My study explores the role of social interactions in increasing support for corporate sustainability, particularly in the context of ongoing crises in the macro environment. I build upon institutional change, change agent, and social-symbolic work literature. Institutional change literature provides insights into exogenous and endogenous change processes. Literature on change agents highlights the role of individuals who seek to change the institutions in which they operate. Social-symbolic work provides a framework of analysis for how people negotiate social meanings. While prior literature acknowledges the importance of social interactions in driving institutional change, there is limited research on how precisely interactions contribute. My qualitative study investigates how social interactions influence support for institutional change. It analyses the spread of the sustainability agenda in corporate organisations in South Africa during several crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a grounded theory methodology, I collected and analysed primary data from semi-structured interviews and a focus group. 18 change agents participated in my research. 13 change agents were directly employed by eight different corporations listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and the remaining were employed by other organisations along the value chain, such as in suppliers. I found that social interactions play a major role in furthering the sustainability agenda in two ways. First, there are three ways agents challenge the values of someone who is not a change agent: value association (pointing out where sustainability and corporate values align), value relocation (contextualising a non-corporate value into the corporate space), and value shifting (facilitating a person’s introspection). Furthermore, a crisis catalyses this by disrupting the routines of the non-agent, leading to anxiety, which change agents could creatively leverage to accelerate change contagion. Second, change agents use social interactions to drive sustainability transitions through negotiating with one another on what sustainability means. I termed this process value negotiation. Value negotiation legitimises and operationalises sustainability transitions, thereby accelerating change contagion. My research builds upon existing scholarship. First, it introduces the concept of change contagion, which scholars can use in the future to analyse how ideas spread between people. Second, it articulates the role of social interactions in driving institutional change by describing the mechanisms which lead to the permeation of change agency. Third, it adds to social-symbolic work literature, particularly to our understanding of value work, as it introduces the concepts of value association, value relocation, value shifting, and value negotiation. Last, it provides insights into the how crises provide opportunities that can be leveraged by change agents to accelerate institutional change and catalysing change contagion. My findings also provide practical insights. Firstly, it recommends the positioning of agents throughout the value chain, linking them together through spaces where they could interact with one another. Second, my study shows how sustainability teams can harness crises to further corporate sustainability transitions. Finally, my findings provided some tools and techniques agents could use to help spread change agency.