Factors for Organisational Learning enabling Sustainability Transitions : A case study exploring a Public Service Agency in Scandinavia

The growing interest in sustainability amounts pressure on organisations to operate in more environmentally friendly ways, sparking the need for radical sustainable change. The purpose of this study is to discover what factors and conditions facilitate and hinder organisational learning for sustainability transitions (ST), a topic that has caught recent academic attention and thus needs further interdisciplinary research. The conceptual framework derives inspiration from the Four Factors of Learning for ST whilst the Competing Values Framework and the Three Loops of Learning are used as additional lens to better understand the conditions of learning for ST. The thesis will take a qualitative approach through conducting a content analysis of three company documents and seven semi-structured interviews with employees from a public service agency in Scandinavia currently implementing a transition lab. A descriptive analysis of the coded data highlights the levels of understanding and acceptance towards sustainability transitions from the case organisation and the conditions that facilitate and hinder organisational learning. The results show that the most prominent of the Four Factors of Learning for ST in the early phase of a sustainability transition is interpersonal, followed by material, institutional and intrapersonal. Within these factors, the discussion further highlights the most prevalent sub-codes and themes that reoccur in the data. Moreover, five key findings under the themes of flexibility versus control, resource availability through digitalisation, communication, collaboration and facing complexity using institutional logics were identified as the primary facilitating and hindering factors that promote learning for STs. Finally, recommendations are presented to inform both theory, and practice, as further analysing learning for ST is of high relevance to better understand and design these learning journeys and a more sustainable (organisational) future