AUTHOR=Lozano Rodrigo , Garcia Iciar TITLE=Scrutinizing Sustainability Change and Its Institutionalization in Organizations JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sustainability VOLUME=1 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainability/articles/10.3389/frsus.2020.00001 DOI=10.3389/frsus.2020.00001 ISSN=2673-4524 ABSTRACT=

Organizations (i.e., civil society, corporations, and public sector organizations) have been instrumental in driving sustainability. In the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in organizational sustainability, and an increase of organizational change management for sustainability. Although, there have been many efforts aimed at incorporating sustainability in organizations, incorporating, integrating, and institutionalizing sustainability in organizations is still under-researched. A survey was developed for investigating the importance of how sustainability has been embedded in organizations' system elements. The survey was sent to a database of 5,299 contacts from different organizations worldwide. From the total, 281 useable responses (6.78%) for the organizational change part were obtained. The variables analyzed were mainly ordinal scales, therefore, non-parametric methods were used for the analyses, including descriptive, Friedman test for ranking, and Kruskal Wallis and Wilcoxon tests for comparisons. More than 90% of the responding organizations have been working with sustainability for more than 5 years. The main driving forces for sustainability have been motivated equally by external stimuli and internal factors. The focus on sustainability and recognition of the impacts that the organization has are fairly aligned. The findings show that the main areas, from the start and during the changes, have been on governance, management and strategy, and operations and production. The majority of the changes were effected between six and seven systems elements, which indicates a large degree of institutionalization. The comparison tests show that the nature of the organization plays a key role for where the sustainability changes start, and how the changes affect system elements. The research highlights that it inconsequential where sustainability changes start, as long as sustainability is adopted throughout all the system elements, including internal and external stakeholders. Planning sustainability changes must address its four dimensions holistically, as well as technical, managerial, and organizational issues, and the organization's stakeholders.