Tinkering With the Plumbing of Sustainable Enterprises: The Case for Field Experimental Research in Corporate Sustainability

In this introduction, we first review the lessons learned in development economics about the ability of randomized control trials to analyse what Duflo refers to as the “plumbing problems” of policy implementation, as opposed to “engineering problems” of policy design. We then examine the papers published within this special issue from a plumbing-based perspective to highlight the benefits of the co-creation of knowledge in corporate sustainability through a field-based experimental agenda. We finally propose that field-based experiments can radically influence the future development of our (and related) fields of inquiry in three ways: (1) focusing on the implementation processes of sustainability strategies, (2) shifting attention from the analysis of past events to the design of future actions, and (3) yielding our role as sole owners of the knowledge development process and agreeing to shared ownership with the organizations we study.