What is new? As financial pressures intensify and research becomes more complex and interdependent, universities are increasingly prioritising collaborative work within and beyond academia. This shift has revealed a significant gap in co-production and collaboration and a critical need for professional support in identifying stakeholders and developing and facilitating partnerships across disciplines and sectors. This paper addresses that gap by combining an evidence base grounded in academic literature with insights from practice to create a transferable framework for research-enabling staff. The framework provides the tools needed to drive the culture shift essential for universities to navigate complexity, strengthen collaboration, and remain competitive in a rapidly changing landscape. What was the approach? This work combines systems thinking, stakeholder theory, and qualitative, practice-based insights. The conceptual framing draws on a literature review of stakeholder theory from business and management, particularly Freeman’s foundational research, alongside Meadows’ concept of leverage points for systemic change, Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner’s systems convening as a leadership practice, Wheatley’s work on leadership in complex systems, and the UCL Co-Production Collective model for inclusive stakeholder engagement. The framing is further informed by 33 facilitated conversations conducted in summer 2024 with a diverse cross-section of the UK research ecosystem, including technicians, research managers, professional services staff, and others in research-enabling roles. These in-depth discussions explored power, leadership, recognition, and cultural dynamics in collaborative environments and illustrate emergent patterns that informed the theoretical framing and practical examples presented in this paper. What is the academic impact? Effective stakeholder engagement for co-production requires a systematic approach underpinned by the often-invisible infrastructure of research enablers. Achieving this frequently requires a culture shift within the institutions in which we operate. Universities therefore need to design and sustain systems that actively facilitate this culture shift. This paper gives evidence, a transferable framework, and applied examples to equip research enablers to participate fully in this structure by providing a framework and embedding co-production principles in theory and practice. What is the wider impact? Behind every successful collaboration is an invisible architecture: research enablers who build trust, connect systems, and create the cultural conditions for co-production. This research makes that architecture visible and actionable, driving a culture shift as institutions design and sustain the infrastructure needed to embed collaboration and co-production at scale.
In commons and institutional research, the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IADF) has proven itself as a useful tool to investigate the complexities of social-environmental systems. It is effective in guiding researchers through the process of understanding complex problem situations. The framework helps to conceptually unravel the institutional scaffoldings structuring human-nature interactions. Yet, a long-standing critique of the IADF and its derivatives is that they fall short of making different workings of ‘power’ explicit, especially those illuminating structural and intersectional aspects. We believe that the IADF holds potential to help operationalise a large variety of perspectives on power and visualise how they may play out in commons governance regimes – a potential that has been underused thus far. In this paper, we draw on discussions about the necessity and advantages of integrating the study of institutions and power and engage with various conceptualisations of these terms. We reflect on existing proposals for such an integrated analysis, highlighting the contribution of our broad approach to understanding power. Further, we lay out the methodology we used for reviewing literature on power theory and identifying related empirical questions, mapping these questions to different IADF elements in a coding matrix, and creating the basis for the development of a diagnostic tool from this initial mapping. In a section dedicated to theoretical framing, we outline the main approaches to power that inform this paper and then continue to introduce the pathway toward our diagnostic tool through a few exemplary applications, including a discussion on limitations and potential next steps.
This study investigates how replication-based esports, in which athletes' real-world physical performances are transferred into virtual environments through the input–output mechanism of meta-sport, reshape stakeholder roles and governance in professional sport. Focusing on road cycling, the study explores the legitimacy of replication-based esports and how virtualization redistributes authority between federations and platform providers. 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives from nine stakeholder groups (athletes, coaches, teams, federations, sponsors, media, competition organizers, fans and hard-/software providers). The analysis applied Loy's (1968) dimensions of institutionalized sport – organizational, technological, symbolic and educational. Most stakeholders treat meta-sport as a separate discipline. Virtualization increases stakeholder visibility, broadcasting and fan-athlete interaction, while requiring platform-specific hardware, digital literacy and distinct tactical skills. Performance transparency facilitates data-driven scouting but raises concerns about manipulation and integrity. Gender parity appears more achievable in virtual events. Crucially, governance is shifting toward co-governance: federations continue to provide normative legitimacy and sanctioning authority, whereas platform providers exercise infrastructural authority by controlling data capture, calibration, in-competition mechanics and algorithmic validation. This dual model generates both tensions (e.g. anti-cheating enforcement) and synergies (e.g. standardized rules adapted to platform features). The study foregrounds how digital infrastructures reconfigure institutional authority in sport by empirically documenting co-governance in replication-based esports and extending stakeholder theory to conceptualize platform providers as hybrid co-governors and rule-enforcing actors. Findings contribute to debates on institutionalization and governance in sport management and to the emergent literature on metaverse-based sport.
Circular economy (CE) initiatives require coordination among stakeholders whose roles, resources, and interests are often unevenly distributed across value networks. Existing CSR, ESG, and stakeholder engagement frameworks offer useful starting points, but they do not fully explain how these relationships are governed during circular transitions. This paper develops a multitheoretical framework for stakeholder relationship management in CE initiatives. It draws on a systematic literature review and a qualitative content analysis supported by NVivo. Stakeholder Theory, Shared Value Theory, the Resource Based View/Relational View and Transition Management Theory are used to interpret recurrent themes in the literature and to organize them into four analytical dimensions: Value, Management, Resources and Processes. The framework then uses Newcombe's power‐interest matrix and the AA1000 standard to connect these dimensions with differentiated engagement strategies and accountability practices. The paper argues that CE stakeholder management should be treated not as a generic participation exercise, but as a governance problem involving stakeholder salience, value creation, resource mobilization, and transition processes. The proposed framework offers scholars a way to connect currently dispersed strands of CE and stakeholder research and provides practitioners and policymakers with a structured basis for addressing stakeholder interdependencies, power asymmetries, and accountability requirements in CE governance.
An open-access course that teaches the foundations of advocacy and organisational change to researchers, research software engineers, and research technical professionals, structured around the UNICEF five-step advocacy cycle.
Environmental organisations (EOs) are not‐for‐profit organisations that contribute to responsible innovation (RI) efforts to mitigate the climate crisis as central catalysts in society. While the RI discourse in management research acknowledges that collaboration between a broad variety of actors is necessary to foster climate action, so far, we lack knowledge about EOs' innovation methods, strategies, practices and outcomes. Such research is, however, needed to support them in their innovation activities and facilitate multiactor collaboration. To explore this phenomenon, we present a case study to explore how EO members may innovate the organisation's communication strategy from within to develop its RI capability. Using qualitative, ethnographic methods, we investigate a particular process in which a local subdivision of a Danish EO attempts to revise and innovate the overall communication strategy of the EO to mass mobilise for postanthropocentric climate action. In our analysis, we shed light on the gestalt of this process, which resembles, we argue, an emancipation process. Accordingly, we examine democratised, participatory innovation practices and the subsequent adaptation to existing organisational communication. In the particular case, we suggest that this leads to a combination of opposing communication messages and the mainstreaming of the outcome of the innovation process.
