SKEMA Centre for Sustainability Studies

Research themes

Adopting interdisciplinary perspectives, the members of SCSS focus on four themes within sustainability research: 

Sustainability Transitions, Climate Adaptation and Resilience  

This theme brings together scholars addressing the grand sustainability challenges of our time: climate change, biodiversity loss, energy transitions, and socioecological resilience. It integrates the natural and social sciences with organizational research to understand how societies, firms, and institutions navigate complex environmental transformations. We examine how firms transform business models, adopt governance mechanisms, and engage with complex socioecological systems to adapt to climate risks and mitigate environmental impacts.  

Key research areas include sustainability strategy, governance and business model transformation; climate change adaptation and resilience; climate change mitigation; sustainability transitions and environmental stewardship; losses from extreme weather events; and earth systems change and planetary boundaries.

Responsible Technology & Innovation

This theme explores the dynamic relationship between technology and innovation and organisational practices - examining how they mutually shape one another across dimensions including business models, environmental sustainability, and governance mechanisms. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, it bridges technology and innovation management, sociology of innovation, operations and supply chain management, and organisational learning to contribute to scholarship and generate insights for firms and policy making.

The theme brings together scholars working at the intersection of AI, digital platforms, green technologies, intellectual property, and responsible innovation, with an ambition to produce research that is inclusive, attentive to geopolitical dynamics and committed to ensuring that the benefits of technological change are equitably distributed.

Social justice, human rights and gender in organisations

This theme focuses on the social dimensions of global challenges: diversity in all its forms and foregrounding human agency to understand the role and responsibilities of organisations within society and the environment, across individual, organisational, and societal levels. Our research attends to the social injustices of our moment: the backlash against sustainability governance, the narrowing of democratic and civic spaces, and the ways these pressures weigh on gender and human rights, push vulnerable stakeholders to the margins and affect well-being and health in organisations and society. We are equally interested in what alternatives might look like - forms of organising that could help advance social justice, equality, diversity, inclusion, and rights - and in how these questions play out differently across the world, from Europe to the Middle East, the African continent, the Americas, and the poles.

Human-centric corporate sustainability  

This theme views corporate sustainability as meeting the needs of a firm’s direct and indirect stakeholders (such as shareholders, employees, clients, pressure groups, communities, etc.) without compromising its ability to meet the needs of future stakeholders as well. Based on this conceptualisation, the Human-Centric Corporate Sustainability theme investigates the psychological, behavioural, and organisational mechanisms that drive organisational members engagement in sustainable transitions.  

While traditional sustainability research often focuses on macro trends or technical environmental metrics, this theme places the human factor at the center of the sustainable enterprise. We explore how individual values, employee behaviours, and leadership style and characteristics can contribute together to address the sustainability (i.e., social and environmental) grand challenges.

Our objective is to unlock the "black box" of corporate sustainability by investigating it across three interconnected levels of analysis: the Individual (micro-level), the Change Agents (meso-level), and the Organisation (macro-level).