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Introduction
In January 2007 Marks and Spencer (M&S) announced an ambitious five-year strategy to become "the world's most sustainable major retailer." This highly ambitious strategy was titled "Plan A", and subtitled, "Because there is no Plan B, because we've only got one world. And time is running out" ([20] Marks and Spencer, 2009, p. 3). Indeed, the fact that the Carbon Trust identified that the 2007 global carbon footprint was approximately 7 million tonnes ([21] Marks and Spencer, 2010a) emphasises the stark reality embedded in the title.
The Plan A strategy is an integrated business model founded on the comprehensive triple bottom line of economic (profit), social (people) and environmental (planet) sustainability considerations ([61] Elkington, 1997). The strategy aimed to make the UK and Irish operations carbon neutral by 2012; however, this ambitious target was subsequently amended to, "Reduce store, office and warehouse energy usage by 25 per cent per sq. ft. by 2012 and by 35 per cent per sq. ft. by 2015" ([21] Marks and Spencer, 2010a, p. 43). Since it did not possess this knowledge it brought in external expert advice from green organisations including: The Carbon Trust, Forum for the Future, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund (WWF-UK) and Business in the Community.
In 2007, three green stores were opened in Bournemouth, Glasgow Pollock and Galashiels and further national expansion provided the opportunity to apply Plan A principles to design, build and operation of new stores. The Sheffield Ecclesall Road store was chosen as the prototype Plan A learning store to provide lessons for future building projects and it opened in April 2011. [40] Pourdehnad and Smith (2012) noted that although a number of authors (e.g. [12] Jamali, 2006; [31] Molnar and Mulvihill, 2002; [47] Smith and Sharicz, 2011) have discussed the value of organisational learning to enable sustainability a much smaller number (e.g. [62] Fenwick, 2007) have investigated the practical issues. Therefore, the M&S learning store provides an opportunity to add to the literature.
The project team, comprising of experts, developed strategies to enable and capture learning across all stakeholders through a systematic approach to allow learning to take place, before, during and after the store's construction. This was an independent strategy which was not explicitly motivated by learning organisation principles. However,...