Tina Sendlhofer

Tina Sendlhofer is a Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), working within the Cities, Communities and Consumption Team in the Societies, Climate and Policy Support Division.

Her research is grounded in organizational sociology with a focus on how sustainability transitions are socially constructed, morally negotiated, and institutionally shaped. For instance, she examines how entrepreneurial and organizational identities emerge and gain legitimacy under shifting normative and regulatory conditions, and how actors navigate competing institutional logics in sustainability-oriented fields. Central to her work are processes of discursive legitimacy construction, sensemaking, and moral decoupling, particularly in contexts where social and environmental ambitions confront entrenched market structures and policy regimes.

Empirically, her research spans contexts such as apparel, food, transport, circular and social entrepreneurship, small- and medium-sized enterprises, municipalities and emerging carbon dioxide removal technologies. Across these domains, she investigates how sustainability ideas travel, how they are translated into organizational practice, and how actors contribute to – or resist – institutional change.

Tina holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Stockholm School of Economics. Her doctoral work contributed to research on sustainable business models within the interdisciplinary research program Mistra Future Fashion and the Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets. Following her PhD, she received a stipend by the Swedish Retail and Wholesale Council and conducted her postdoctoral research on employees’ roles in advancing sustainability within organizations. She has maintained long-standing engagement with the Swedish and global apparel industry and is an inaugural affiliated researcher at the House of Sustainable Society at Stockholm School of Economics.

Tina’s SEI publications are listed below.