Internal and external communication for sustainable development : Case study on the municipality of Gnosjö

Sweden hosted the first environmental development conference in 1972 and since then has been a European role model in sustainability issues (UN, 1972), following the triple bottom line: concern for the planet, people and profit (Coombs & Holladay, 2012). The present study deals with the application of micro-ethnography in sustainable communication, in the case of the municipality of Gnosjö in Sweden. Based on internal, external and strategic communication literature, the case study of Gnosjö, in which different areas of organisational communication were represented and how they affected the sustainable development of the organisation, is presented and analysed. It was investigated, which communication channels the municipality uses, how these channels look like and which aspects influence the communication and its development. The approaches of micro-ethnography were applied to collect and evaluate data. For this purpose, data were collected from participating observations with employees at Gnosjö town hall and the collection of seven interviews with informants from the fields of communication and sustainability and constantly compared. The exploratory data analysis reveals how the employees remained powerless in performing their work routine. Politicians, as the main decision-makers, play an important role in the development of the municipality. Therefore, they should attend training programs to understand the importance of sustainable communication internally and externally.