Institutional Change towards a Sustainability Agenda: How far can theory assist?

Abstract

This paper offers a case study of a major university initiative to embed sustainability into practices in a number of ways, with a focus here on embedding the sustainability agenda across the curriculum. The purpose of this is to examine how far the concepts and axioms around change processes which run out of two theoretical traditions are borne out by this case. Those traditions are, first, social practice theory, an ontological perspective on the social world which has implications for how both stability and change are accomplished in organizations and beyond them. Second is an approach to the management of change specifically, a more immediately practical theory termed complex-adaptive systems theory. The paper’s intent is to consider how far such theories of change offer managers lenses for seeing the issues involved, while illuminating some of the key factors that the social practice and complex-adaptive systems theory viewpoints foreground.