Challenging Advertising: The potential for environmental change through the values and institutional work of senior managers

Harvey, Victoria (2025) Challenging Advertising: The potential for environmental change through the values and institutional work of senior managers. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

The UK’s legally binding net-zero targets aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; however, continuing high levels of consumption—amplified by the advertising industry’s promotion of highly polluting goods and services—undermines these efforts. Industry professionals express strong concerns about advertising’s environmental impact, but their underlying values, and how these values drive pro-environmental behaviours and institutional change, remain unclear.

This study addresses this research gap by exploring how senior UK advertising professionals challenge advertising practices through their values and pro-environmental behaviours. The research uses the concept of institutional work (IW) to understand their efforts to disrupt advertising norms. A critical realist approach guides the qualitative research, which involves thirty semi-structured interviews with senior advertising professionals, supplemented by secondary online data.

The findings make several contributions to the literature. Firstly, whilst senior managers express various altruistic and egoistic values, those with predominantly biospheric values show more pro-environmental behaviours in this setting, contributing to the body of literature in this regard. Those pro-environmental behaviours consist of disrupting and creating types of IW and are often used recursively, differing from descriptions in existing literature. This IW was met with significant barriers, leading to actor level consequences which at times diminished managers capacity for sustained disruption. The consideration of actor level consequences has not been fully explored in the concept of IW and is a key contribution in this area. In an attempt to maintain industry norms, powerful institutional actors engage in responsive, maintaining IW, and in doing so they valorise dual but conflicting normative ideations of the institution of advertising. They aim to resist change and avoid sanctions, however, using valorising in this way has not previously been explored in the concept of IW. Overall, the research deepens our understanding of the interplay between individuals and institutional resistance in the advertising sector’s environmental transformation.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Norwich Business School
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	23 Jun 2025 07:45
Last Modified:	23 Jun 2025 07:45
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99660
DOI:

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