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Grace Augustine, an associate professor of business and society at the University of Bath School of Management in the United Kingdom, has studied sustainability since graduate school, paying close attention to how large organizations such as colleges and universities can reduce waste and mitigate other climate impacts. The field has a limited number of longitudinal, historical studies on which to draw, leaving Augustine wondering whether environmental change inside organizations produces substantial, long-lasting effects.
Teaming up with Michael Lounsbury, a professor of strategic management, organizations, and sociology at the University of Alberta, Augustine set out to analyze a success story: the institutionalization of recycling in higher education. Joined by Leanne Hedberg, an associate professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at MacEwan University in Edmonton, and Tae-Ung Choi, an assistant professor of management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School, the researchers focused on the efforts of a bygone group: recycling coordinators, a facilities management role established in the 1990s in response to grassroots environmental activism by students in the United States and Canada. In a new paper, the researchers investigate whether the work of recycling coordinators made a difference in the long run.
A treasure trove of primary data granted them access to 25 years of conversations across 445 North American higher educational institutions. An active online forum, created in 1995 for recycling coordinators to work across organizations, share ideas, and support one another, offered a window into their daily work navigating a morass of operational and logistical challenges.
“This data isn’t designed with your research study in mind,” Augustine says. “It’s not a questionnaire crafted to answer your own research question. Instead, the data is everyday conversations, and it comes from a time when people talked very freely online.”
The researchers faced an unusual problem. Amassing more than 9,000 pages of single-spaced text, they had too much data, which is seldom the case in qualitative studies that build small data sets from interviews or single case ethnographies. To process this surfeit of conversations and messages from the College and University Recycling Coalition (CURC) forum, they turned to a machine-learning sampling algorithm to identify relevant threads and weed out more mundane concerns appearing in the data, such as where to place recycling bins. By training the algorithm, they were able to assess whether changes proved meaningful over time. Given the abundance of criticism around greenwashing and a number of studies demonstrating how social movements produce positive outcomes in the short term, their priority was to understand downstream effects and to determine whether movement pressures and commitments resulted in changes that scaled and lasted.
“I hear from sustainability managers today that they owe a great deal to recycling coordinators,” Augustine says. “It has made me think about some of the unsung heroes of the environmental movement and how regular employees can play a role in changing their organization.”
The team also conducted semistructured interviews with recycling coordinators who had a combined 141 years of experience on the job, all of them now retired. As these former employees shared memories and reflected on their roles, the researchers discussed their emerging findings with them to develop a better understanding of how recycling coordinators viewed their work. The disappearance of the role, now subsumed by sustainability managers employed by universities and colleges to tackle more ambitious environmental goals, is a testament to the meaningful achievements of recycling coordinators.
“There has been a long-told truism among sustainability professionals that ‘If I’m successful, I’ll work myself out of a job.’ A new study suggests that this is indeed true,” says Andrew J. Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “Recycling coordinators sought to institute new operational practices inside their bureaucracies.
In the process, they also brought about the end of their profession. But rather than seeing this as a sign of failure, this can be seen as a sign of progress.”
Find the full study: “Wasted? The Downstream Effects of Social Movement-Backed Occupations” by Grace Augustine, Leanne Hedberg, Tae-Ung Choi, and Michael Lounsbury, Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.