This research seminar is organized with ERA Chair in Social Innovation.

Sophie Bacq, from IMD, will present "Collective Action for Sustainability: Breaking Down Silos in Management Research".

Abstract: Management scholarship has increasingly recognized collective action as crucial for addressing sustainability challenges. While this has generated valuable insights across different management fields, the literature remains fragmented with limited cross-pollination. Through bibliometric and qualitative analyses of 388 articles, we identify eighteen distinct research conversations across seven management fields, revealing both the breadth of collective action scholarship and opportunities for knowledge integration. Our integrative review aims to bridge these conversations while situating sustainability-focused collective action research within broader management scholarship. The review makes three key contributions. First, we develop an organizing framework that demonstrates how sustainability challenges manifest across multiple levels of analysis and allows us to analyze how different management fields contribute to understanding collective action at different levels. Second, we show how research conversations not explicitly focused on sustainability can meaningfully inform the study of collective action for sustainability. Third, we identify promising directions for future research, including shifting focus from “commons creation” to “commons governance,” exploring boundary conditions of collective action, and examining both intended and unintended outcomes. By bringing scholarly communities together, our review lays the foundation for more rigorous and impactful scholarship at the nexus of CA and sustainability.