How to lead a sustainability transition at the company level? An approach based on management tools performativity

Research on sustainability transitions has generally focused on socio-technical systems, but less on organizations and firms. However, the decisions of actors within companies are based on performance indicators, roadmaps, dashboards, etc., all sorts of management tools that embody their decision-making routines and contribute to maintaining the regimes in place. Our research links the literature on sustainability transitions with that of management instrument approaches in management science, by analyzing the conditions under which management instruments can contribute to impulse a sustainability transition at a company level. We use the concept of performativity to describe the ability of these artifacts to change the reality they point to. Indeed, through the design of a simplified LCA tool and an internal carbon pricing tool within a car manufacturer in the frame of a research-intervention, we have found that these conditions require the construction of the tools legitimacy with their users, but also the mobilization of windows of opportunity in a storytelling and sensemaking process. Finally, we propose a typical organization-wide model of sustainability transition inspired by the multilevel perspective framework. Our work thus contributes to the Sub-theme 54 of the 36th EGOS colloquium: Bridging Systems and Organizational Perspectives to Tackle Grand Challenges.