Making Meaning, Making Change.
Making Meaning, Making Change. Strategic Communication as an Enabling Practice in Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives for Sustainability Transformation
This doctoral thesis examines the role of strategic communication in processes of social transformation, with a particular focus on the emergence and shaping of cooperation between different actors.
| PhD students: | Teresa Otsa |
| Supervisors: | Prof. Dr Thomas Pleil, Prof. Dr Pia Sue Helferich |
| Duration: | October 2023 to September 2026 |
| Participating institutions: | Munster Technological University |
Sustainable transformation describes a profound social change in which existing institutions, values and practices are realigned in the face of environmental and social crises. However, this comprehensive reorganisation remains abstract as long as it is not embedded in concrete social processes.
Multi-stakeholder settings (MSI) are temporary constellations and exemplify such concrete social processes. MSIs provide a forum for actors from, for example, politics, business, civil society and academia to come together. This means that, within these settings, differing interests, bodies of knowledge and institutional logics come into contact with one another. MSIs create arenas in which visions of the future, values and proposed solutions are discussed, actively negotiated and new practices tested.
Research question
Against this backdrop, the question arises as to how such negotiation processes can be facilitated through communication: How can we succeed in making different perspectives compatible, negotiate tensions productively and thereby not only discuss sustainable transformation but also help shape it in practice? The central research question is therefore: How can strategic communication practices shape negotiation processes in multi-stakeholder settings in such a way that they contribute to sustainable transformation?
Methodology and Objective
To answer this question, the study adopts a process-oriented perspective, focusing on the communicative dynamics through which meanings, understanding and orientation emerge over time.
To this end, a qualitative-interpretative research design based on grounded theory methodology has been adopted. In a first step, multi-stakeholder initiatives are examined qualitatively. The aim is to systematically reconstruct communicative practices in negotiation processes. In a second step, the empirical findings will be presented in a practice-oriented format in order to subsequently provide communication-related guidance for the design of sustainable transformation processes.