Umeå universitets logga

Contemporary organizations are currently exploring the possibilities of using digital technologies for business benefits while meeting external and internal demands for increased sustainability (George et al., 2021). Emerging at the intersection of these somewhat contradictory objectives, practitioners have recently recognized digital sustainability as a potential solution to their, and ultimately ours, sustainability problems. In the information systems (IS) field, digital sustainability has been identified as an opportunity for IS sustainability scholars to contribute to the organizational push towards a digitalization and sustainability convergence. By focusing on how to leverage digital technologies for sustainability purposes, this discourse assumes that IS sustainability research will make a positive contribution to sustainable development (Kotlarsky et al., 2023). While the encouraging findings of this one-sided exploration might encourage organizations to pursue digital sustainability in practice, this dissertation argues that it might also expose organizations to the risk of prioritizing the opportunities of digitalization (Chatterjee & Sarker, 2024) while ignoring the contradictions, tensions and challenges that also comes with the organizational pursuit for digital sustainability (Schoormann et al., 2025).

This dissertation identifies this one-sidedness as a research limitation in the digital sustainability discourse. To remedy this gap in literature, and consistent with recent calls for research (Veit & Thatcher, 2023; Fors et al., 2024), this dissertation adopts a nuanced and holistic sustainability lens to advance our current understanding of the opportunities and challenges that comes with digital sustainability. In addition, this dissertation adopts an explorative and interpretative research approach to explore digital sustainability in practice. By drawing upon the findings of an extensive literature review and four empirical case studies, this dissertation makes the following research contributions. Firstly, this dissertation presents a new definition for digital sustainability. Secondly it develops an integrated, holistic and non-technology-deterministic sustainability lens for IS sustainability research. Thirdly, it presents four characteristics of digital sustainability practices and the organizational conditions that supports them. Finally, it presents a sustainability-first approach to move beyond a digital first agenda in research and in practice. Accordingly, this dissertation advances our understanding of digital sustainability on an organizational level and provides new and important insights for IS sustainability scholars and practitioners.