Merriam Haffar
Ryerson University
EXPLORING STRATEGIC COGNITION AROUND SUSTAINABILITY TENSIONS IN CORPORATE REPORTS: TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF STRATEGIC SUSTAINABILITY’ FRAMES
ABSTRACT
Sustainability tensions are inherent to the practice of corporate sustainability. These tension points present the company with strategic choices. We posit that companies interpret and respond to these tensions in ways that reflect an underlying collective cognitive frame—the strategic ‘sustainability’ frame. The purpose of this research is to identify these frames on the basis of how companies interpret and convey their experiences with tensions in their sustainability, and how these frames change over time. To achieve this, we perform a content analysis of reports to study two components of the underlying strategic frame: how companies interpret sustainability tensions and how they convey this interpretation to stakeholders. In doing so, we build a typology of different sustainability frames ‘embedded’ in the reports. We then perform a longitudinal case study of a sub-set of these company reports, in order to explore how these frames are socially-constructed over time.
BIOGRAPHY
Merriam Haffar is a 2015 Vanier SSHRC Scholar, and a fourth-year PhD Candidate at Ryerson University’s Environmental Applied Science and Management Program. Her thesis research focuses on strategic cognition with regards to corporate sustainability tensions. Her other research interests include: context-based corporate sustainability reporting, and organizational resilience. Before joining her PhD program, Merriam worked in the environmental testing industry for several years as an Assistant Branch Manager and lead analyst.