From the Sustainability Adoption to the Measurement of Social Impact: Interventionist Research in a B2B Organisation

The dissertation at hand presents the findings that have emerged from the research intervention in a case study, Gpi Group, conducted with a general objective to propose an approach that would assist an organisation in developing tailored indicators for social impact measurement. Three studies administered within the framework of this interventionist research pursue the aim: i) to explore conditions informing the substantive-symbolic adoption of sustainability agenda; ii) to reveal factors that hinder calculative practices from ensuring accountability of technology companies in the healthcare system; and iii) given the restricted direct stakeholder engagement, to design an approach or methodological tool for the impact measurement indicators. The research has been conducted in the interventionist research tradition, whereby the researcher collaborates with organisational members to solve real-world problems and contribute to scientific knowledge. In this work, the identified problem pertains to the limitations of conventional indicators in measuring implications arising from the Gpi Group’s operations that are borne by final beneficiaries. The company offers a wide range of technological solutions and health booking services for the healthcare sector. However, despite the considerable importance of final beneficiaries, namely medical professionals and patients, they remain underrepresented in materiality, which has motivated this research. The first chapter outlines emerging nuances, power dynamics, and internal tensions when the organisation decides to commit to the sustainability agenda and formalise corresponding standards. By triangulating data from corporate documents, interviews, and survey, and further interpreting them through the lens of Bourdieu’s field theory, it has been revealed that substantive-symbolic adoption of sustainability standards depends on the power dynamics that enable a shared meaning of sustainability and accordingly shape individuals’ habitus. The second chapter explores whether existing calculative practices for impact can ensure the accountability of technology companies operating in the healthcare sector. By identifying commonly used indicators from extant scientific research and non-academic reports and further critically scrutinising them with organisational members of the case study, a limited practical validity of calculative practices is revealed for technology companies. Pragmatic constructivism applied to the interview analysis points to the topoi mismatch and insufficient addressing of a practical validity condition across all dimensions of the actor’s reality construction, which led to the abstract and theoretical indicators. The third chapter describes in detail the indicator-building approach for social impact measurement and the process of integrating derived indicators into Gpi Group’s materiality assessment. Materiality, which is a highly contested concept in the literature, has been examined from a pragmatic stance in this chapter. The application of this approach to the organisational setting, where it is prohibited to involve final beneficiaries by virtue of regulations and ethical concerns, has enabled deriving 21 indicators composing four major materiality topics.