Champion, Activist or Intrapreneur? A Typology of Change Agents for Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

Focus on employee sustainability change agents is growing within corporate sustainability literature yet is fragmented across multiple research streams and disciplines. Increased consistency and clarity are needed for research to support these employees to enact change. In this quest for consistency and clarity, we sought to understand how sustainability change agents are represented within academic literature via a systematic literature review and found a wide variety of terms used to label individual employees who do, could, or should act in support of sustainability, including change agent, champion, changemaker, activist, leader, actor, and intrapreneur. There was almost no consistency in the use of terms relating to whether or not the employee is deliberately making change, the employee's seniority, or (lack of) formal sustainability role. To support both research and practice with improved consistency and clarity of terminology, we propose a typology of terms for employees who make change towards sustainability.