Brent McKnight
University of Western Ontario, Richard Ivey School of Business
The role of organizations in sustainable development
brent.mcknight@gmail.com
Brent McKnight is a doctoral candidate at the Richard Ivey School of Business. His research focuses on the role that organizations play in sustainability. He approaches this research with a systems perspective informed from the study of socio-ecology and he emphasizes the inclusion of multiple levels of analysis. Recent awards include an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council Grant. Brent has published on industrial symbiosis in the Journal of Supply Chain Management, and on institutional work in the Handbook of Institutional Work. His research can also be found in the best paper proceedings at ASAC and AOM. Brent has lectured at the Richard Ivey School of Business on the topic of Corporations and Society. Prior to joining the PhD program at Ivey, Brent was a consultant with Accenture where he deployed large scale software systems for telecommunications clients.
The role of organizations in sustainable development
Organizations are critical to sustainable development. Their size and global influence mandates that organizations are strong participants if sustainability is to be effectively pursued. It is not surprising then that management scholars have been quick to conceptualize and study organization's important role in sustainable development. Scholars have mapped sustainability principles at a broader system level of analysis onto an organization level framework called the triple bottom line. However, in the process, they have made critical assumptions that, I argue, mis-specify the role that organizations play in sustainable development. I first critique these assumptions, and then offer a new framework based on the socio-ecological concept of resilience. I use this framework to conduct an inductive, historical case-based study in the North American automotive industry from 1945 until 2010 to study the role of organizations in sustainable development.