Organisations increasingly face pressure to address environmental and social sustainability as part of their everyday decision‑making. New professional roles have emerged to manage and advocate for sustainability, alongside growing expectations that employees in many roles take responsibility for sustainable practices. Yet sustainability rarely enters organisational life as a simple or uncontested goal.

In practice, decisions related to sustainability often involve competing priorities, uncertain responsibilities, and multiple stakeholders with different forms of authority. Questions such as which sustainability issues should be prioritised, who is accountable for action, and how trade‑offs should be justified are negotiated through everyday workplace interactions.

My research focuses on how these negotiations unfold in practice. I am particularly interested in the work of sustainability professionals and sustainability champions, as well as how others respond when sustainability is introduced into discussions about strategy, design, or organisational change. This includes examining how people make sustainability concerns relevant, how resistance is expressed or managed, and how notions of responsibility and influence are constructed in talk.

The projects featured on this site examine these processes using different forms of qualitative data. One project analyses recordings of naturally occurring organisational meetings, capturing how sustainability‑related decisions are negotiated in real time. The others draw on interviews and focus groups, examining how people account for decisions, responsibilities, and values when reflecting on their work. Together, these studies shed light on how sustainability is practically justified, challenged, and made sense of in organisational life.

Findings from this research also inform the development of practical insights for professionals seeking to communicate, negotiate, and influence decision‑making in ways that support more sustainable outcomes.

This website has been produced with the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/Y009916/1) and Heriot-Watt University, based on research conducted at the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University.