Barcode	Locations	Status
Barcode: 01156210	Locations: OPUS	Status: Online

Humanity has developed socio-cultural structures, global entanglements, and technological capabilities that are changing and challenging the lives of humans and other beings on planet Earth, today and for the future to come. These developments confront organizations with the crucial question of what it means for them to be sustainable and value-creating. Organizations are increasingly grappling with their potential and desired contributions to the people in their immediate vicinity, their broader socio-ecological environments, and societal pathways to sustainable futures. In response to these sustainability challenges, this dissertation aims to explore conceptual perspectives on value and value creation as well as activities of organizational value creation that can facilitate pathways to socially and ecologically sustainable futures. In pursuing this objective, the focus is on sustainable business models and degrowth organizations. The dissertation consists of four core contributions (Articles I – IV) along with this synthesizing framework paper. Articles I and II engage in conceptual research, bringing clarity to the concept of value and providing analytical frameworks for future research on sustainable value creation. Building on this foundation, Articles III and IV provide systematic literature reviews. As a result, Article III identifies twenty-six activity groups, twelve design themes, and three overarching value functions of sustainable business models: maintaining, unlocking, and sharing value. Article IV examines the profound socio-economic shifts implied by degrowth, identifying thirty-nine patterns of degrowth-oriented organizational value creation, organized into seven groups, and derives seven corresponding theoretical propositions. Finally, this framework paper presents the dissertation’s overarching research philosophy and design and situates its contributions within a theoretical meta-framework. This metaframework delves into the dynamic nexus of value, contextual structures, organizational activity, and imagined pathways to sustainable futures. Drawing on this meta-framework, this framework paper concludes by discussing how the four articles’ research findings can inspire organizational transformation and inform further conceptual, empirical, and practitioneroriented research. Overall, this dissertation offers insights and guidance for forward-looking steps in both academic research and organizational practice for sustainable futures.