Firms often face similar sustainability pressures, yet they adopt very different combinations of practices.
Some focus on emissions, others on suppliers, employee wellbeing, reporting, compliance or innovation. This project explores that diversity and asks why organisations respond in such different ways over time.
The PhD would examine how sustainability practice portfolios emerge, evolve and differ across firms, sectors or institutional environments. It could explore whether different constellations of practices are shaped by industry conditions, managerial beliefs, resource constraints, stakeholder pressures or path dependencies. The study might look at how firms combine environmental and social practices, how these combinations shift, and whether some patterns are more stable, adaptive or effective than others. Depending on the applicant’s skills and interests, the project could draw on qualitative case work, document analysis, comparative designs or large‑scale secondary data.
The project moves away from single best‑practice assumptions. Instead of asking whether firms adopt sustainability, it asks how they assemble different sustainability repertoires and what this reveals about organisational change. The topic would appeal to applicants interested in sustainability strategy, operations management, institutional pressures and organisational diversity, while offering strong potential for theory development.
