Academic profile
Birthe Soppe is Associate Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is also Vice Director and Principal Investigator of the research centre INTRANSIT, hosted by the University of Oslo with a focus on sustainability transformation, digitalization, and innovation policy. Birthe’s research addresses, broadly speaking, the interface between business and society. Specific research areas include organization theory, institutional theory, and sustainability. Birthe examines organizational and institutional dynamics and processes of meaning making out of which new markets emerge and existing ones evolve, and does so particularly in the context of sustainability-related change processes. As part of this research agenda, she also investigates novel forms of inter-organizational collaboration and how organizations cope with extraordinary societal challenges, including technological novelty, negative social evaluation, and climate change. Empirically, her work addresses settings such as renewable energy, clean transportation, fair trade, and ethical fashion. One of her current research projects focuses on how industry incumbents in the energy sector respond to the grand challenge of climate change.
Birthe holds a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Regensburg. Prior to joining the University of Innsbruck, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and faculty member at the University of Oslo. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Oslo, and the University of Innsbruck. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, such as Organization Studies, Research Policy, and Journal of Small Business Management. Birthe Soppe serves as ad-hoc reviewer for several international journals and conferences, regularly acts as convenor or organizer of academic conferences and workshops, and currently supports the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Management Reviews (IJMR) as a Consulting Editor.