(Inconvenient) Truth or Fairy-tale: Sustainability at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Abstract

This mixed methods research aims to understand how staff and students of the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) experience the sustainability initiatives of the university. Sustainability in organizations is gaining importance now that organizations feel socially responsible for their ecological impact and are held accountable for this impact. VUA claims to have developed policies and practices to try to become a more sustainable organization. This research aims to discover what the frontstage of these initiatives entails and how they are experienced in the backstage by staff and students. This led to the research question: How can the frontstage and the backstage of sustainability initiatives of the VUA be aligned? Methods used to gain an understanding of the frontstage and backstage of the sustainability initiatives of VUA are qualitative ethnographic methods (fieldwork, interviewing, participant observation, observation and document analysis) and a quantitative survey. The data gathered offers insight into the sustainability initiatives of VUA as they are presented to the outside world and experienced in practice, concluding that the faculty and students of the Faculty of Social Science experience a discrepancy between the front and backstage of the sustainability accounting efforts of VUA.