An exploration of the roles played by external sustainability consultants in organizations

Abstract

One of our most important, yet difficult, missions in modern society is to make the world more sustainable. Due to the complexity of sustainability issues, the lack of knowledge or expertise in the area, companies may choose to hire an external sustainability consultant to further their sustainability work. Despite the importance of sustainability consultants, there are relatively few researchers who have paid attention to their role in making organizations more sustainable. Hence, we ask: What roles do external sustainability consultants play in their clients’ organizations? In researching this, twenty interviews were conducted with Swedish-based sustainability consultants and client companies to capture the roles and combination of roles. In addition to the roles found in previous research, two new roles emerged in this study: Spider in the Web characterizing the relational aspect, and the Knight in Shining Armor characterizing the urgency in solving problems fast. The existence of two additional roles for sustainability consultants (compared to management consultants) could be due to the wickedness of sustainability issues. Furthermore, we stress that sustainability consultants can combine roles either simultaneously or sequentially, which is generally neglected in previous research. It can also be concluded that sustainability consultants can be clustered into change agents and agents of stability. However, we found no indications of the “fashion-setter” clustering in our empirical material, despite this being outlined in previous management consultant literature.