Designing and Using Carbon Management Systems to Promote Ecologically Responsible Behaviors

Abstract

With the hope of mitigating the harmful impacts of climate change, many organizations are taking actions to reduce their carbon footprints. Carbon-reducing initiatives in organizations are varied: they range from green product innovations to encouraging behavioral changes by customers and employees. Green IS can play an important role in environmental sustainability by supporting a number of these strategies. Drawing on theories of persuasive systems design, this paper explores how one category of Green IS, carbon management systems (CMS), can be designed and used in order to persuade employees to perform ecologically responsible behaviors. The results from three organizational case studies suggest that CMS can be effective at changing employees' environmental behaviors, demonstrate the extent to which persuasive system design principles (including an emergent category of Integration) are reflected in CMS, and highlight the importance of understanding the persuasion context. The findings of the study are used to inform the development of four propositions, which can serve as a foundation for further research in the Green IS domain.

Information Systems Solutions for Environmental Sustainability: How Can We Do More?

“…The results of this search revealed that, except for two papers (e.g., Corbett (2013) and one paper published in the special issue (Loock et al 2013)), the few green IS papers accepted for top journals were conceptual or analytical in nature. In Table A1, we critically overview each paper and indicate where the research might go if it focused more on solutions.…”

“…In Table A1, we critically overview each paper and indicate where the research might go if it focused more on solutions. Corbett (2013) This paper investigates how to design and develop carbon management systems (CMS) that persuade employees to develop pro-environmental behavior. It identifies eight new design principles including two related to task support; namely, commitment and personal learning.…”

Sustainability: Are We All Talking About the Same Thing State-of-the-Art and Proposals for an Integrative Definition of Sustainability in Information Systems

“…The holistic view on economic, ecological and social aspects is, however, rarely observed in the literature. Articles in the review range from tackling only a single ecological dimension [7], [9], [49], [53], [13], [45], [51], [55], to attributing the same degree of importance to each of them [4].…”

“…Among the addressed ecological problems are reducing the global carbon footprint [7], [14], [48], waste reduction [8], [11], [16] and resource consumption optimization [9], [13], [55].…”

“…IS research reports on competing and overlapping definitions of sustainability [11]- [13]. Different dimensions of sustainability are observed [6], [9], [14] and the concept is being applied at different analytical levels [4], [7], [15], [16]. Given the lack of clarity on the meaning of the term, numerous studies dedicated to sustainability omit explicit definitions of sustainability, which is of course leads to further vagueness.…”