embedding sustainability in organizational culture - Network for ...

appeNdIx Chapter 1: a: Introduction Methodology
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How are they doing it?: For each practice, we asked ourselves, how are they
going about it? Initially, we used codes such as talk, model, system, rule, procedure
and codify. We began to group these into two categories of approaches: informal and
formal.
When are they doing it?: Again, our aim was to assess where each organization
was along the sustainability trajectory (from just starting out through to truly
embedding sustainability). Unfortunately, the data sources frequently did not lend
themselves to this kind of assessment. While we continued to attempt to code the
data in this way, in the end, we did not make use of these codes in our analysis.
Our inability to sort the practices in this way led to one of our recommendations
for future research—that researchers attend to where an organization is along the
sustainability trajectory.
As we proceeded with coding, we began to develop a tentative framework as a way
to organize the practices. We observed that any given practice might be coded as:
informal/fulfillment; formal/fulfillment; informal/innovation; or formal/innovation
and that we were finding practices with each of these characteristics. This led to
the development of a framework that contrasts the goal of the practice with the
approach to making it happen. (More information on the development of this
framework is provided below).
As a final quality assurance check on our data set, at the end of our preliminary
coding round, we sorted all of our sources by ascending number of practice codes.
We reviewed all studies with zero or only one code to confirm their inclusion or
exclusion from the study. We excluded sources without any practice codes or other
relevant codes and documented our rationale for excluding them. These exclusions
are reflected in the summary table presented above.
critical appraisal of the data
A key part of the systematic review process involves making a critical appraisal of
the review findings. Our initial desire was to be able to make an assessment of the
strength of support of each research study. Our desire was to be able to compare
the studies in terms of sample sizes and effect sizes. We did attempt to classify our
studies in this manner. However, the vast majority of the studies included in this
review did not report effect sizes, reflecting the tendency for research in this area
to make use of qualitative case studies of ‘sustainability leaders.’ In our view, this
finding alone presents a reflection on the state of the literature in this domain.
An additional issue that we faced was that many research studies made reference
to the efficacy of particular practices that went beyond the empirical findings of the
paper. This is not unique to this research domain, but it did present challenges for
our method, given that our unit of analysis became the practices themselves, rather
than a given study. Our response was to switch from assessing the strength of each
study and instead, to code each individual practice in term of its degree of empirical
support. We used three codes for this purpose: proposed but not yet tested (P);
empirically supported (E); and empirically tested and unsupported (N).
Practices were classified as proposed but not yet tested (P) if the practice was
proposed in a practitioner report, a book aimed at practitioners or in the case where
empirical papers proposed a practice that went beyond the empirical findings of that
particular paper. Practices were classified as empirically supported (E) when the
particular practice was the subject of empirical testing in the article and the practice
received empirical support. Practices were classified as empirically tested and
unsupported (N), when the particular practice was the subject of empirical testing in
the article and the practice did not receive empirical support. In the end, there were
only three instances of practices that were reported as unsupported out of a total
pool of 1695 instances of practices. In each case, it was not the entire practice that
was unsupported, but rather an aspect of the practice. These instances are addressed
in the text in the discussion on the particular practice and are marked in Table A2.
data synthesis
Our coding process was systematic, inductive, and emergent (Holton, 2007). Our
codes evolved through constant iteration comparing practice to practice to find
patterns, and to establish similarities and differences between practices. The codes
were assigned by going line by line through the data to identify and label actions,
characteristics, and qualities as they arose. Based on an evolving framework that
aimed to group practices according to their approach and their goal, we began
tentatively grouping practices into categories. Codes that seemed to be similar were
grouped into tentative categories. Practices in a category were compared and sorted,
and the properties of each category were articulated and refined.
The process of grouping, defining and refining codes was achieved through an
active and ongoing discussion between the co-authors. We spent hundreds of hours
reviewing and discussing each and every instance of a practice (1695 quotations in
total) and made decisions about where to place it, how it was similar to or different