My research intersects sustainability, organizational theory and international business. While my research is primarily grounded in business and organizations, I have drawn on geographers’ work (e.g., place, sense of place) to advance sustainability research in business, seeking answers for the ecological case for business, not just the business case for sustainability.
The current paradigm for business organizing seeks economic efficiency, whereas a sustainable development paradigm requires businesses to accommodate the ecological, social, and economic principles between the local and global. My work focuses on understanding organizations’ actions to address a dynamic equilibrium between the global and local, which is key for sustainable development, and relies on various qualitative methods, such as ethnography, grounded theory and case studies.
I specialize in inductive qualitative methods to build new theory because sustainable development phenomena are often new and need answers to ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. A person who has studied, worked and conducted research in four countries on three continents, I am particularly interested in contexts out of North America to explore new phenomena and challenge the way we understand known phenomena.