Affordances in Action: Unpacking the Role of Strategy Tools in Implementing Sustainability Strategy

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how strategy tools shape the bottom‐up implementation of sustainability strategy. Based on an inductive case study of GAMMA, a Scandinavian university faculty, we show how tools afford coordinating and learning, which create a recursive and self‐reinforcing mechanism of strategy implementation. Going beyond static, controlled and sequential approaches, these findings extend research by showing how tools shape evolving forms of strategizing across organizational levels, and assign strategic responsibilities to different actors. For managers, the findings highlight the importance of using tools not only as planning devices but also for continuous coordination, learning, and responsibility assignments that help adapt sustainability strategy over time.