Organizing for sustainability: the case of VIMEC

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the conditions that enable a company to organically initiate the transition process towards sustainability. Starting from the literature on change management, the study focuses on identifying a thread to create a new key to understanding change, where change itself is still in its embryonic stage, but many factors already play a key role in shaping the chances of future success of corporate sustainability programmes. A theoretical framework was then developed, comprising the factors which, according to the literature on corporate sustainability, change management, sustainable and circular entrepreneurship, and piecemeal, to the literature on sustainability pre-implementation factors, are considered critical for initiating sustainable change. In order to have a clear comprehension of the issues covered in the model, the first chapters are focused on providing a theoretical background. The first chapter is focused on sustainability, circular economy, and how these paradigms are applied to the business world, then the second chapter focuses on the changes that organizations face after the introduction of circular considerations for conducting their business. The third chapter analyse corporate sustainability highlighting how such change process is managed. The objective of this chapter is to develop a framework for analysing corporate sustainability from a new perspective, that of companies that have not yet started their sustainability programmes. The chapter starts therefore with the description of the Leading Change Model proposed by Kotter (1995), a model analysing each stage of transformation and the errors to avoid when implementing organizational changes. Then, organizational change is analysed under the lens of sustainability issues, finding drivers for such change, and discussing the Sustainability Phase Model proposed by Dunphy et al. (2003). The analysis of these frameworks and of the literature surrounding them has highlighted the critical importance of the leadership in driving change, and the weight that effective planning of these organizational changes plays in the probability of success of these programmes. The focal point shifts therefore in the last part of the chapter, where supporting conditions are analysed which, if present before the kick-off of the process, would guarantee an organic planning of organizational change, and thus higher probability of success. From this overview of the literature, a comprehensive model is developed for companies planning sustainable transition, which will be the theoretical background for the research conducted. The research has been conducted through a single holistic case study, that of VIMEC S.r.l., and has highlighted and corroborated the role played by these preconditions of sustainability in starting and driving corporate sustainability. The results of this research have also highlighted some considerations that could be further analysed in future research.