The Organization of Social Sustainability Work in Swedish Eco-Municipalities

Abstract

Even though large parts of a municipal administration’s work are aligned with social sustainability, this dimension has been somewhat more challenging and there seems to be a vast diversity in how it is approached. Academic literature on the systematic organization of this work is sparse. The aim of this study was to understand how Swedish municipalities organize their work with social sustainability and to find best practices. A survey among 21 municipalities and follow-up interviews with three of them were conducted. The study revealed that the organization of social sustainability work varies considerably among municipalities and that no simple patterns relating to size or existing organizational structures can be detected. Each municipality seems to be finding its own way and is more or less successful in strategically working with this area. Best practice focused on creating additional structures for collaboration across departments, with external actors, and across sectors to at least partly overcome the silo approach engrained in a municipal structure. It was also connected to the active involvement of leaders, clear mandates, and that a common vision for social sustainability was communicated. These lessons can be transferred to other municipalities and help them move towards social sustainability in a strategic way.

Social Sustainability in Business Organizations: A Research Agenda

“…Below we build on our own previous work, and summarize the discussion and status quo in three main fields: general business management, product development, and the supply chain field. Both authors have focused their academic work on social sustainability within organizational contexts for over a decade [5,6,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], having conducted both empirical work and extensive literature reviews. From this, we present in the following section a research agenda that we believe is necessary to move the field of social sustainability in business organizations forward, and it is intended to be an invitation and call to action to fellow researchers in the field, so that academic research could help guide systematic change in business organizations toward social sustainability.…”

“…In municipal planning, for example, the lack of a clear definition, the resulting inability to choose issues and support tools, and organizational structures are real challenges. Consequently, even though large parts of a municipal administration's work are social sustainability work, it does not seem easy to structure the efforts and coordinate the work [26]. This implies that there is not much to glean from other research fields and that additional and original research is required.…”