The Management Research Group is looking to fill a 50% position for a research associate (m/f/d) as soon as possible. The detailed job advertisement can be found under the following link. Application deadline is March 18, 2024.

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As every year, the "Renewable Energy Management" and "Introduction to Business Administration" courses were rounded off this year with exciting guest lectures from the field. Florian Hauser (Audi AG) gave a lecture on the transformation of the automotive industry and the particular challenges this poses for AUdi in the Introduction to Business Administration course. In the Renewable Energy Management event, Hilko Heddinga, alumni of the University of Oldenburg and Senior Consultant at the management consultancy plenum, gave insights into current projects in the energy sector. Many thanks to the speakers for the exciting presentations!

Jörn Hoppmann swapped the lecture for the turntables at this year's "Night of the Profs" event and played for an hour in the Oldenburg club "Polyester". The setlist ranged from German hip hop (Beginner, Fettes Brot, Seeed, Deichkind) to English rap (Macklemore, Missy Elliot, Black Eyed Peas) and alternative (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blur, Nirvana and White Stripes). The audience sang along enthusiastically and bid Jörn Hoppmann farewell with shouts of "encore". The aim for the next few years is to achieve the title of "DJ h.c.", which is awarded after three appearances.

"Night of the Profs" has a long tradition in Oldenburg and was held for the 14th time this year. The proceeds go to a good cause, this year to the Oldenburg animal shelter and Sea Shepherd.

The fall conference of the Scientific Commission for Sustainability Management (WK NAMA) of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB) took place from 27 to 29 September. The most important meeting place for researchers in the field of sustainability management in German-speaking countries was held this year under the motto "Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability".

A good 80 participants accepted the invitation to Oldenburg and experienced a very varied and informative program with 4 parallel paper sessions on different topics in the field of sustainability management as well as a panel discussion on the question of how researchers can increase the impact of their research on practice. Another highlight was a presentation by Claudia Hauschild, Head of Corporate Communications & Sustainability Management at Rügenwalder Mühle, on the topic of "Transformation processes towards sustainability" as well as the conference dinner in the Baroque Hall of Oldenburg Castle, including an introduction to the history of Oldenburg. Before the conference, a workshop was held for doctoral students in the co-working space CORE, during which the young researchers received extensive feedback on their research.

The conference was organized by Joern Hoppmann and Josua Oll in collaboration with Prof. Bernd Siebenhüner, Prof. Christian Busse, Prof. Klaus Fichter and Prof. Sascha Alavi.

A new paper "Not My Business: How Individuals’ Role Identities Shape Sensegiving During Corporate Sustainability Initiatives" that is co-authored by Joern Hoppmann, Marcel Richert (University of Hamburg), and Timo Busch (University of Hamburg) has just been published by Organization & Environment.

In the paper, the authors show how individuals' perception of #sustainability and their roles jointly shape the extent to which they engage in sustainability initiatives. The literature has long shown that the degree to which individuals support organizational sustainability initiatives depends on their perception (e.g., whether they perceive sustainability to pay off or not). A core task managers have during change initiatives therefore is to change individuals' perception by making use of #sensegiving (i.e., providing individuals with information and #framing it in specific ways). In our paper, we study the sustainability initiative of a medium-sized company to show how such sensegiving can be done effectively. We find that if sensegiving efforts are successful critically depends on how individuals perceive their own role in the organization. Individuals who see their role as primarily contributing to the economic success of the organization (economic role identity) ignored and filtered out information managers provided on sustainability (e.g., as they directly deleted related emails). Individuals that perceived environmental and social issues to be part of their organizational role (hybrid role identity) were more open to sustainability-related information and thus more responsive to managerial sensegiving. Making progress on sustainability therefore requires managers to not only use sensegiving but also to change individuals' role identities (e.g., by altering role definitions and creating new roles). By showing the drivers and barriers of such role identity changes, our research holds important implications for both theory and practice. We therefore hope that our research helps facilitate the many sustainability-oriented change initiatives in companies and speed up the global sustainability transition.

For anyone interested in learning more, the paper is available open access at journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10860266231183955. A previous version of this paper has won the “ONE Best Paper Award” at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2017 in Atlanta.

As every year, the courses "Digital Transformation" and "Strategic Sustainability Management" ended with guest lectures by practitioners. In the course "Digital Transformation", the company Transform8 reported on its day-to-day work in consulting on the topic of digital transformation. One particular focus was on the use of digital dashboards in the area of sustainability reporting. In the lecture "Strategic Sustainability Management", Christian Blanke from the "Madaster Foundation" gave a presentation on the use of online material registers in the building sector. By registering all materials and products contained in buildings or infrastructure, Madaster allows to establish a circular economy in the construction industry and thus to strongly reduce CO2 emissions in this sector. The presentation was followed by a lively discussion on the drivers and barriers to sustainability in the construction industry