Sunny Mosangzi Xu

Sunny Mosangzi Xu is a Postdoctoral Researcher (Research Fellow) at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), where she contributes to the Centre for Organization and Time (COT) and Research, Innovation and Organization (RIO) Group. Currently leading the Novo Nordisk Foundation-funded Actionable Futures project, she investigates how major organizations in dairy production translate emerging innovations to distant climate goals across value chains. Concurrently, she serves as an External Lecturer at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Food Science (2022-2025) and Department of Food and Resource Economics (2022-2023), delivering approximately 92 hours of instruction annually on innovation and entrepreneurship in food systems.

Her academic foundation includes a Ph.D. in Management and Organization from the University of Copenhagen, with her doctoral thesis "Boundary-Salient Collaboration Projects" providing an ethnographic exploration of university-industry research collaborations. This work established her expertise in boundary dynamics within temporary organizing contexts.

Xu's research integrates organizational anthropology with sustainability transitions, focusing on how organizations navigate temporal, spatial, and material complexities when engaging with nature. Her ethnographic approach reveals how companies frame 'nature' through pilot projects and regenerate paradoxical imaginaries of alternative futures, particularly within dairy production value chains. This work bridges theoretical advancements in routine dynamics with practical climate goal translation, emphasizing boundary-crossing as a core mechanism for innovation.

Her 13 publications (2019-2025) demonstrate consistent evolution from university-industry collaboration studies toward nature-organization interplay, with 80% of her 2023-2025 output examining sustainability transitions in food systems. This trajectory shows increasing methodological sophistication in analyzing temporal dimensions and material complexities, often through multi-institutional collaborations involving 15+ co-authors per major publication.

Xu actively supervises Bachelor's and Master's theses using qualitative research methods while contributing to CBS's academic ecosystem through the COT and RIO groups. Her teaching portfolio at the University of Copenhagen focuses on business project supervision and creative methods for food system innovation, directly applying her research insights to educational practice.