Projects - J (Jilde) Garst PhD MSc

Dr Jilde Garst is a researcher in corporate sustainability and responsible innovation. Her research focuses on how formal and informal rules influence corporate responses to sustainability transitions. Her work can be divided into two research streams.

Her first research stream concerns the effectiveness and legitimacy of voluntary standards that aim to steer business practices towards societally desirable goals. Her research in this field is inspired by her own role in the development of standards for professional education in public health in her role at the International Diabetes Federation. The standards she investigates come in various shapes and sizes: from front-of-pack labels that influence product innovation practices to the reporting standards that steer the development and alignment of non-financial reporting practices. Dr Garst’s work has provided insights into how these standards need to address the – often conflicted – needs of the business and society at large and how not balancing these needs can lead to legitimacy issues and eventually the standards’ demise. In her current project on non-financial reporting, Dr Garst further investigates the role of standards on the strategic choices of firms. She investigates how the selection of sustainability topics for reporting and strategic action is influenced by non-financial reporting standards – such as GRI and SASB reporting standards, the EU directive on non-financial reporting, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Her second research stream is focused on how businesses detect and absorb changes in societal values and norms. Central to this research stream is the question of how interactions between a firm and other societal actors change the firm’s internal story on its role in society and how that adjusted story then leads to changes in its activities. In her PhD, she investigated how food manufacturers translated the value ‘health’ and associated norms into design requirements for their product innovations. In her development of the new concept ‘Value-sensitive Absorptive Capacity’, she provided a framework on the capabilities a firm requires a) to identify changes in a societal value, b) articulate these changes in their innovation process and c) reflect upon conflicts between stakeholders about the norms related to this value. Her current project is about universities and how their organizations are transforming in response to sustainability transitions in society.