Strategic Communication for Sustainable Organizations ― Theory and Practice

This is a seminal book for anyone who wants to understand, shape or study the communication surrounding sustainability in their interactions with colleagues, employees, supply chain partners and external stakeholders. It develops essential insights on the basis of an extensive review of relevant theories and research drawn from multiple disciplines. Interview data gathered from organization members who are currently communicating about sustainability in their cities, universities, nongovernmental organizations, small businesses and large for-profit organizations provide valuable insights from a practitioner’s perspective. The interviewees represent organizations such as the Portland Trailblazers, Tyson Foods, the City and County of Denver and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Theory, research and interview comments combine in a reader-friendly way to provide practical insights and stimulate future research.

Myria Watkins Allen is a Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Kentucky in 1988. Since then she has authored or co-authored over 40 scholarly articles and book chapters, and presented approximately 65 papers at regional, national, and international conferences. Her scholarly articles appear in journals representing at least 5 disciplines. In 2008 her research focus shifted to corporate environmental issues, including environmental sustainability. Today, she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes related to sustainability, and serves on several of her University’s sustainability-related councils and committees. She has consulted with or collected data in organizations since she earned her Ph.D. In terms of sustainability-related consulting, she helped a Fortune 100 and a Fortune 500 company each communicate new corporate sustainability initiatives to their employees, worked with the owners of a small company to brand a new environmentally sustainable product, consulted with a major waste management company and a city to identify communication strategies to promote citizen recycling efforts, participated on an interdisciplinary team focused on influencing residential electricity customers to use smart meters to manage their electricity consumption and helped design communication campaigns designed to reduce energy use at her University and within an elementary school. In addition, she gathered longitudinal data from 1291 parent-child dyads about their environmental attitudes, behaviours, and conversations regarding the environment. Allen utilizes the GRI Framework in her Sustainability Reporting work, which is supported by knowledge obtained from the GRI Certified Reporting Course and practical experience. Allen attended the Carbon Disclosure Project 4 hour Climate Change Course - Administered by the ISOS Center for Social Responsibility.