Abstract
Food waste is a non-sensical problem with a range of social, environmental and economic impacts. The UK hospitality industry alone wastes the equivalent of 1 in 6 meals that they serve, 75% of which is avoidable (WRAP, 2013). It is the biggest sustainability issue that hospitality employees face and yet there is little understanding within the hospitality food waste literature about how employees can drive change in food waste prevention within their workplace. Filling this gap in research is important because hospitality employees are the ones dealing with food, and food waste, every day and are on the interface of multiple stakeholders, which means their role in food waste prevention should not be understated.In this alternative format thesis, I demonstrate how hospitality employees drive change in food waste prevention practices by developing our understandings of sensemaking processes within complex environments where there are multiple issues that require attention. Taking a qualitative approach, I conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with a range of employees and leaders from across the hospitality industry. The findings are presented across three papers. In each paper, I develop theoretical insights into different aspects of sensemaking in order to advance our understandings of sensemaking in complex environments so that sensemaking theory can be applied more effectively to organisational phenomena, like hospitality food waste. The first paper illustrates how other sensemaking issues influence the way in which sensemaking cues about food waste are noticed and made sense of. The second paper shows how hospitality employees and leaders move between different types of sensemaking which results in them distributing additional sensemaking cues. The third paper suggests that there are temporal dimensions to how and when hospitality actors access sensemaking cues. By monitoring what is going on in the environment, sowing the seeds for change, and creating the right conditions for growth, hospitality employees are able to drive change in food waste prevention, alongside managing other organisational concerns.
Overall, these findings contribute to the hospitality food waste and sensemaking conversations by enhancing our understandings about how organisational actors can tackle vital organisational issues when there are so many other things to make sense of. These lessons are crucial for individuals trying to address vital organisational issues in an increasingly chaotic and complex world.
| Date of Award | 24 May 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Baris Yalabik (Supervisor), Peter Nuttall (Supervisor) & Iain Davies (Supervisor) |