Strategic Communication for Sustainable Organizations

Sustainability and Communication.- Changing Paradigms, Shifting Societal Discourses and Organizational Responses.- Legitimacy, Stakeholders and Strategic Communication Efforts.- Understanding Pro-environmental Behavior: Models and Messages.- Transformational Organizational Change, Reinforcing Structures and Formal Communication.- Using Communication to Create Environments That Empower Employees.- Facilitating Group Collaboration and Enhancing Supply Chain Conversations.- Our Shared Journey Towards Sustainability.

Myria Watkins Allen is a Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Kentucky in 1988. Since then she has authored or co-authored over 40 scholarly articles and book chapters, and presented approximately 65 papers at regional, national, and international conferences. Her scholarly articles appear in journals representing at least 5 disciplines. In 2008 her research focus shifted to corporate environmental issues, including environmental sustainability. Today, she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes related to sustainability, and serves on several of her University's sustainability-related councils and committees. She has consulted with or collected data in organizations since she earned her Ph.D. In terms of sustainability-related consulting, she helped a Fortune 100 and a Fortune 500 company each communicate new corporate sustainability initiatives to their employees, worked with the owners of a small company to brand a new environmentally sustainable product, consulted with a major waste management company and a city to identify communication strategies to promote citizen recycling efforts, participated on an interdisciplinary team focused on influencing residential electricity customers to use smart meters to manage their electricity consumption and helped design communication campaigns designed to reduce energy use at her University and within an elementary school. In addition, she gathered longitudinal data from 1291 parent-child dyads about their environmental attitudes, behaviours, and conversations regarding the environment. Allen utilizes the GRI Framework in her Sustainability Reporting work, which is supported by knowledge obtained from the GRI Certified Reporting Course and practical experience. Allen attended the Carbon Disclosure Project 4 hour Climate Change Course - Administered by the ISOS Center for Social Responsibility.

Myria Allen, professor of communication, received the Christine L. Oravec Research Award in Environmental Communication (book category) at the November 2015 National Communication Association conference, one of the two largest annual conferences of communication scholars from across the globe, for her new book Strategic Communication for Sustainable Organizations: Theory and Practice (Springer, 2016).University Arkansas News, Dec. 09,2015