The lack of sufficiency among management researchers through the institutionalization of air travel

Abstract

Research on environmental sustainability within higher education institutions (HEIs) neglects mostly the behavior of the researchers themselves. Applying to this problem, it should not be overlooked that academics face competing logics within HEIs. While on the one hand sufficient behavior could reduce air travel, exactly those flights encourage careering in neoliberal academia. To analyze why there is still a lack of sufficiency among management researchers and how their established behavior can be sufficiently restructured, we build on Delbridge and Edwards’s (2013) approach of “inhabiting institutions” and investigate how the (dominant) institutional logic of academic careering in the era of neoliberalism thwarts the (subordinated) logic of sufficiency. Forty-three interviews with pre-docs, postdocs, and professors disclose which barriers (e.g., personal benefits, structural barriers, and consequences of neoliberalism) and promoters (e.g., personal commitment, rule making, and system change) to sufficiency exist on micro, meso, and macrolevels. Our results show which interdependencies these levels are subject to and how actors are able to initiate a change toward sufficiency while inhabiting complex institutional settings.