This paper reports on the results of a design science research (DSR) study that develops design principles for information systems (IS) that support organisational sensemaking in environmental sustainability transformations. We identify initial design principles based on salient affordances required in organisational sensemaking and revise them through three rounds of developing, demonstrating and evaluating a prototypical implementation. Through our analysis, we learn how IS can support essential sensemaking practices in environmental sustainability transformations, including experiencing disruptive ambiguity through the provision of environmental data, noticing and bracketing, engaging in an open and inclusive communication and presuming potential alternative environmentally responsible actions. We make two key contributions: First, we provide a set of theory-inspired design principles for IS that support sensemaking in sustainability transformations, and revise them empirically using a DSR method. Second, we show how the concept of affordances can be used in DSR to investigate how IS can support organisational practices. While our findings are based on the investigation of the substantive context of environmental sustainability transformation, we suggest that they might be applicable in a broader set of contexts of organisational sensemaking and thus for a broader class of sensemaking support systems. What are appropriate design principles for IS for sensemaking (i.e., sensemaking support systems) in environmental sustainability transformations? To address this question, we conducted a design science research (DSR) study to develop a set of design principles that concern a class of information systems,
Organizations are increasingly using sustainability reports to inform their stakeholders and the public about their sustainability practices. We apply topic modelling to 9,514 sustainability reports published between 1999 and 2015 in order to identify common topics and, thus, the most common practices described in these reports. In particular, we identify forty-two topics that reflect sustainability and focus on the coverage and trends of economic, environmental, and social sustainability topics. Among the first to analyse such a large amount of data on organizations’ sustainability reporting, the paper serves as an example of how to apply natural language processing as a strategy of inquiry in sustainability research. The paper also derives from the data analysis ten propositions for future research and practice that are of immediate value for organizations and researchers.
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