IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/corsem/v32y2025i5p6301-6316.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Elaine M. Daly
  • Rachael K. Gould
  • Patricia Lagun Mesquita

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Elaine M. Daly & Rachael K. Gould & Patricia Lagun Mesquita, 2025. "Champion, Activist or Intrapreneur? A Typology of Change Agents for Corporate Sustainability," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 32(5), pages 6301-6316, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:corsem:v:32:y:2025:i:5:p:6301-6316
    DOI: 10.1002/csr.70018
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.70018
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/csr.70018?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:corsem:v:32:y:2025:i:5:p:6301-6316. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1535-3966 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.