Managing switching effects in sustainable projects: case studies

Abstract

This work proposes a new framework for sustainability improvement based on the analysis of the changes created by organisations’ sustainable projects (SPs). The purpose is to help businesses making strategic decisions to better achieve both business and societal objectives. Revising the concept of Switching Costs and Benefits to focus on organisations’ change effects, we apply multiple case-study analysis to co-create the framework with four participating firms. Firms are purposely selected based on pre-established criteria of financial and sustainability performance. Through a reiterative process, research is untangled in three stages of interactions with participants for a total of six societal objectives and 34 projects. Primary data are collected from heads of departments or sustainability project managers through semi-structured interviews, surveys, and email exchanges between 2018 and 2021. This paper provides theoretical and practical contributions. In particular, this research extends the theoretical discussions about how to reconcile business and societal interests by adopting a new perspective to organisational decisions based on the assessment of change effects. Practically, the proposed analysis offers an alternative approach to the evaluation and ranking of SPs as well as the achievement of their societal objectives.