Organisational networks in market contexts

Last changed: 08 September 2021
Network and system in different colours with people in profile spread out

The goal of Work Package 4 is to understand and assess the impacts of contemporary communication expectations and practices on the willingness and ability of organisations to embrace sustainability.

Work Package 4 focuses on organisations’ responses to pressures that require them to make their engagement for sustainability visible. It does so in two contexts:

  1. The UN Global Compact which works through a reporting approach, where organisations show their progress towards meeting sustainability criteria.
  2. The example of global cotton supply chains where we investigate the effects of intersectoral communication.

We will employ a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and work in close cooperation with relevant organisations and networks. This includes workshops with stakeholders to iterate the results and to ensure that they are translated into useful outputs.

By examining disclosure, reporting and partnership against the backdrop of a complex digital and networked communication context, the WP will help reframe environmental communication as multi-modal and multi-nodal.

The knowledge produced in this WP will complement the insights into communication and consumption (WP2), and communication in (social) media (WP5). It will also link to the work on intersectoral communication and dialogue (WP1), and feed into programme-wide synthesis work in WPs 6 and 7.