Rewriting Narratives in a Sustainable Transition: The SDGs as Frame or Living Story at the University of Southern Denmark?

The PhD thesis sheds light on a problem within higher education institutions, which have been indirectly asked by the UN to relate to and even implement the 17 SDGs. Many higher education institutions around the world have adopted the SDGs as a strategic focus with the desire to create holistic and purposeful changes. This has led to intentional change processes, where the SDGs are to be implemented in several significant parameters at educational institutions such as teaching, research, campus operations, and collaborations with external stakeholders.


The primary motivation for the thesis is to examine the process of change with the SDGs as a strategy from a narrative perspective. The narrative perspective on organizations draws on David Boje's (2008; 2001) storytelling organization perspective, which includes different nuances of the sensemaking impact of narratives on organizations. In addition, it is a core argument that narratives are used by organizational actors to create and construct meaning in their lives. Organizational actors do this, e.g., by including both backward-looking and future-oriented sensemaking in situational and fragmented stories, which contrast with or challenge the understanding of the strategic narrative. The narrative focus from Boje's theory supports that the thesis examines change processes around the SDGs from a dissensus-orientation rather than a consensus-orientation, which characterizes the existing research about the SDGs and higher education institutions. A dissensus perspective focuses on finding differences, refractions, tensions, conflicts, and the less clear organizational voices, whereas a consensus perspective focuses on alignment and homogeneous and integrated solutions (Deetz, 1996).


The thesis examines a Danish university, the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), which in 2019 chose to focus on the SDGs as a primary strategy. For this work, the thesis is based on methods from ethnographic case study, where various documents have been collected, interviews made, and observations carried out. The results from the thesis are presented in three articles.


The first article is a systematic scoping review with a focus on synthesizing and analyzing literature in the field of narratives and intentional organizational change. The review is structured according to PRISMA guidelines and results in 91 included studies, all of which examine narratives in the context of changes in organizations. The 91 included studies are analyzed and categorized, which shows the field's trends and variations within methods, types of intended changes that are investigated, the actors that are investigated, and different purposes for investigating narratives within the field. The review emphasizes that within the field there is a tendency to use qualitative 11 ethnographic methods preferably combined with document analysis, interview, and observation. The review discusses these findings and points to a number of future research opportunities. These are 1: Group interviews, group conversations, discussions, and workshops; 2: Action-based research; 3: External actors’ voices; and 4: Newer tendencies such as innovation and sustainability. The article has contributed to the thesis by outlining approaches and perspectives to explore how narratives influence sensemaking when implementing an SDG strategy. Further, the article shows a need for narrative research concerning sustainability, or the SDGs, in relation to intentional change.


The second article explores how a counternarrative approach can be used to reveal tensions and contradictions of SDG-work and thereby helps to understand the complexities of intentional SDGwork. Further, the article asks to illuminate, from an organizational actor perspective, which counternarratives are already given by the SDG framework. The article identifies three counternarratives with related counter-themes that the organizational actors at SDU navigate daily during the preliminary change process. The counternarratives concern “integrity in talk-action dynamics”, “sustainability urgency in a long-term change perspective”, and “meaningful fluffiness”. The counternarratives show that actors navigate tensions that come from what is formally communicated as the university's intentions, and what concerns this can cause among actors, such as not living up to the promised strategic narrative, a top-down approach to a soft and value-driven strategy, and concerns about SDG-washing and how it can reflect the view of the university. Furthermore, the counternarratives illuminate a temporal complexity where actors find themselves giving up on the background of the very intangible and forwarded aspects of change for a sustainable future. The data shows tension between a desire to change mindsets in the long-term and to achieve quick wins in the short-term, such as adopting more sustainable approaches to transport, paper use, and greener canteens (also called campus greening). In addition, it is difficult for some actors to act according to the agency that the SDG framework provides, which means that their will to act is lost in the long-term future orientation. Finally, the counternarratives show ambiguities embedded in the SDG framework, where actors find the SDG framework very fluffy and difficult to actualize. This can cause a feeling of being powerless. The SDG framework contains a wealth of endless possibilities, and it seems that the easiest way to start the process is by rewriting the known practices into the framework. In particular, the third counternarrative shows complexities of change directly linked to the SDG framework, which is relevant to SDG work in general.


The third article deals concretely with the part of Boje's theoretical framework that addresses future orientation. The study is based on the observation data, which is set in relation to the university's formal strategy documents. The study aims to explore contextual scenario articulation in meeting situations where organizational actors naturally relate to the future in their communication. The intention is to add a micro-oriented perspective to strategy work, where actors through their communication invent content for the SDG strategy which is constructed through language. The actors' use of future-oriented narratives is put in relation to a very linear and goal-driven "future as perfect" communication, which the actors encounter in the formal and management-driven strategy narrative. To understand the relationship between strategy and meeting situations, the article focuses on the strategy-as-practice field by using a distinction between organizations' practice and praxis (Whittington, 2006). The study shows that the organizational actors use future-oriented communication in different ways, where e.g., non-linearity, multi-temporality, scenario imaginings, fictionality, and uncertain use of language are characteristic. The study argues that this form of nonlinear future orientation in the language is used naturally by the actors in meeting situations and stands in contrast to the strategy which is more secure and coherent in the language form. The study shows that organizational actors must orchestrate two kinds of narrative logic in the work of implementing the SDG strategy at SDU.


The thesis discusses the results of the articles by e.g., including perspectives from the theory section as well as literature identified from the review article. The discussion section focuses on discussing how the application of Boje's theory contributes to the research fields within the SDGs in higher education institutions as well as narrative organizational research. Furthermore, the section discusses, respectively, the complexity surrounding and temporal consequences of SDG-related changes. This leads to implications for higher education institutions and organizations in general that aim to work with sustainability strategies. The discussion ends by discussing some limitations linked to the methods used as well as the dissertation's trustworthiness and generalizability.


The thesis concludes that the change process with the SDGs as a strategy at a university shows several complex nuances that are relevant to highlight to the understanding of actors' sensemaking processes. Narrative sensemaking appears in this context in different forms with different purposes. Strategic narratives contribute with linearity and clear objectives but have a consequence for organizational actors who need to break down the narrative in communicative situations by reinterpreting, reinventing, and deconstructing based on their own tasks and contexts. Furthermore, the thesis points out that sustainability implementation based on the SDGs contains challenges and 13 nuances that should be considered in connection with future strategies regarding sustainability. Finally, the thesis points to opportunities for further research, where, in particular, the uncertainty that arises in the link between linearly formulated strategies and narrative sensemaking can be investigated.