Green Information Systems for Belief Formation in Organizational Sustainability Transformations

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Type and Duration

FFF-Förderprojekt, January 2013 until September 2015 (finished)

Coordinator

Hilti Chair of Business Process Management

Main Research

Business Process Management

Field of Research

Process Management

Description

Public and business organizations, a dominant part of our society, have always been a main contributor to the degradation of our natural environment, through their resource consumption, greenhouse emissions, and wastage production (Melville, 2010). Information systems (IS) have become a key resource to assist organizations in their efforts of implementing environmental sustainability (Thibodeau, 2007). Specifically, it has been suggested that information systems can play a meaningful role in altering individual beliefs about the natural environment (Bengtsson & Ågerfalk, 2011; Melville, 2010). These beliefs, in turn, impact on individual behavior, thereby inducing sustainability actions (Melville, 2010). An example for information systems that aim to influence individual beliefs about the natural environment are software cockpits that show environmental indicators such as carbon emissions, energy consumption or paper consumption, and that allow an open and inclusive dialog about the sustainability topic. However, to date, it is unclear how to design information systems that influence beliefs about the natural environment (Melville, 2010).
In order to fill this gap, the intended study seeks to investigate how organizations can design and implement information systems that change beliefs about the natural environment in general, and about sustainability transformations in particular.

Reference to Liechtenstein

Liechtenstein companies increasingly seek to become environmentally sustainable as they react to normative, regulative, and cultural cognitive pressures exerted by the external environment. The project develops important knowledge about how information systems can be built that support key processes related to sensemaking in such transformations.

Keywords

Information Systems, Sustainable development, sustainable economics, Organisational development

Principal Investigator

Prof. Dr. Stefan Seidel

Project Collaborators

Dr. Leona Chandra Kruse

Dr. Nadine Székely

Prof. Dr. Jan vom Brocke

Partner

  • IT services department

Sponsor

  • Forschungsförderungsfonds der Universität Liechtenstein

Publications

  • Seidel, S., Chandra, L., Reuter, N., Stieger, D., & and Gau, M. (2014). Green e-community: Sensemaking in Environmental Sustainability Transformations. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference DESRIST 2014, Miami, FL, USA. (VHB_3: C)

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