Wren Montgomery

Associate Professor, Sustainability & General Management

JJ Wettlaufer Faculty Fellowship

Dr. Wren Montgomery studies how various forms of social organizing can advance – or obstruct – change. She is primarily interested in the role of collaboration and unconventional coalitions in overcoming obstacles to solving the world’s most pressing challenges, with a focus on the intersections of climate change, water crises, soil degradation, and social justice. Her research integrates and contributes to theories of change across institutional theory, social movements, economics, and entrepreneurship. She is particularly interested in how social organizing impacts two critical and interrelated issues, greenwash and justice:

Greenwash: Greenwashing is when an organization misleads people into adopting overly positive beliefs about its environmental performance, practices, or products. Wren’s research has been pivotal in defining greenwashing and its tactics, and informing strategies to stop it. Her work has been featured in prominent media outlets, such as The Washington Post, Fast Company, CBC Marketplace, and The Network for Business Sustainability. In 2023, Wren also co-founded the Greenwash Action Lab to make academic research and insights accessible to policymakers, NGOs, and managers leading anti-greenwashing efforts.

Social justice and resource equity: Wren researches important questions, such as: Who can access critical resources, like clean water? And how can individuals, communities, companies, and coalitions make resource distribution more equitable? Her keystone work in this area, a multi-year project on water access, won a best dissertation (ONE) and best paper award (OMT) at the Academy of Management for its deep theoretical contributions, as well as prominent awards – the IACMR-RRBM Award for Responsible Research in Management and the NBS-ONE Research Impact on Practice Award – for its real-world impact.

Dr. Montgomery is deeply committed to doing research that has both academic significance and real-world impact. She is a passionate educator and seeks to do this by: helping students to understand the roots of problems and identify leverage points for change; researching and providing successful approaches and tools to changemakers; engaging and working collaboratively with impacted communities; and, by serving on government, NGO, and corporate boards. Wren is also an experienced management consultant and senior government policy analyst and is always happy to collaborate in doing the vital work of making change.