Revisiting Sustainability with a Business Management Lens

Introduction

In the last couple of years, rising concerns about issues such as depletion of nonrenewable resources and climate change have become the main driver for organizations to engage in sustainable activities. ¹ Organizations announce and report their environmental activities to establish competitive advantage and to indicate their legitimacy to the public. However, these activities are largely voluntary and therefore operationalized through nonbinding law. As a result, it is becoming increasingly common for organizations to engage in practices that could be construed as greenwashing. ²

At the theoretical level, the notion of sustainability is barely discussed or analyzed explicitly and thoroughly in top‐level business management journals. Articles on sustainability have been mostly published in journals related to environmental studies, clean production/waste management, and policy, but not in business management and organization studies. Thus, it is not uncommon that the implementation of sustainability goals is limited by the ubiquity and vagueness of its technical explanation ³ in more general publications. Because the term itself lacks definitional agreement and clarity regarding the best way to implement sustainability at a practical level^4–6 and what sustainable development means in a wider context, ⁷ the general public has very little knowledge about sustainable development and organizational performance.

This article examines the exact nature of global environmental sustainability and what makes it distinctive from other collectivities of business and organizations. An overview of the literature, with particular focus on the relationship among organizations, illustrates the tension between public, private, and nonprofit sectors. A framework to address the different levels of analysis pertaining to sustainability is proposed, including a discussion of avenues for future research.

Theoretical Framing and Definition

Top‐tier journals in the field of business management were examined in order to perform an analysis of sustainable development. Included were such publications as: the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), the Academy of Management Review (AMR), the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), the Journal of Management (JM), the Journal of Management Studies (JMS), the Management Science (MS), the Organization Studies (OS), the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), and the British Journal of Management (BJM), among others. These journals were then individually searched for articles that contained the keywords “sustainability” and/or “sustainable development” anywhere within the body of the text.

This methodology generated 226 articles in total that include a discussion of “sustainability” or “sustainable development,” theoretically or empirically. Manual examination of these articles were then winnowed to remove irrelevant and distant matches as well as to reduce them to a manageable number. Within this framework, this study identified a number of publications that met these criteria, further reducing the total number of articles for examination to 79. From there, each article was examined and analyzed.

The literature analysis suggests that the concept of sustainability began in the mid‐1970s as a result of debate on the economic impact and social purposes of applying science to address environmental problems. ⁸ The terms sustainability and sustainable development emerged prior to the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report entitled Our Common Future, but perhaps the most widely used definition of sustainability is the one proposed by the Brundtland Commission, which defined sustainability as: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 369). ⁹

While this definition tends to be more practical and is accepted by business and government, ¹⁰ NGOs chose to focus on the ability of people to continue to live within environmental constraints. ¹¹ Since then, several initiatives have emerged at the local, national, and global levels to address different aspects of social, environmental, and economic concerns. ¹¹

Sustainability can also be defined as a kind of well‐being management of the people/society, environment, and economy over a long period of time or even an indefinite period of time. ¹² Despite these differences and variations, there seems to be general agreement that the terms sustainability and/or sustainable development have been interpreted in three different dimensions: human/society, economy, and environment. ¹⁰

Perhaps the most current concern for academicians and policy makers is the contradiction in the concept itself. On one hand, sustainable relates to renewal and perpetual, constant regeneration, while on the other hand, development implies growth, production, and movement. Thus, for development to be sustainable, it has to include constant renewal to assure the continuity of resources, population, and society. Indeed, to incorporate development, sustainability must allow change and adaptation to address different socioeconomic characteristics in different countries. ¹³ The ideas of balancing economic and social factors are contrary to the environmental imperatives of conservation and renewal of resources. ¹⁴ Since sustainable development is a long‐term initiative, the longer we wait, the higher the cost of reversing the damage done by development. ¹⁵

For a public sector example, in the United Kingdom, the government has defined the notion of sustainable development as a kind of comprehensive strategy to address multidimensional challenges that are predicted to emerge over the next 20 years. In this case, sustainable development does not mean having low economic growth and development; instead, the government aims to promote a healthy economy to generate adequate resources to meet people's needs. The government embraces sustainability by focusing on people's health, natural resource conservation, scientific analysis, precautionary actions, and environmental impacts, as well as the polluter‐pays principle. ¹⁶

Sustainability and Organizations

The fact that sustainability and ethics are intertwined with organizations is no longer new. Indeed, ethical as well as environmental choices are critical in most business and organizational contexts. The notion of sustainability itself stemmed from the environmental movement, ¹⁷ and perhaps as a consequence of the globalization phenomenon. However, the connection of sustainability with the goal of adjustment to the new social, economic, and physical environment has been interpreted as a missing piece in the puzzle. ¹⁸

From the perspective of organizations, institutional theory has developed a niche in explaining diffusion as the reason organizations adopt sustainable actions. ¹⁹ In the process of adopting such actions, institutional theory suggests actors involved in sustainable initiatives become isomorphic or ever‐more similar. Developments in theories of organizational isomorphism have helped garner appreciation for the experience of uniform pressure ²⁰ of sustainable initiatives and demonstrate two kinds of conformity: compliance to meet social expectations and response when facing similar situations. ²¹ This conformity might affect private businesses and public organizations as well as nonprofit organizations.

Blind Spots in Sustainability?

The literature review suggested that the extant literature on sustainability is somewhat narrowly focused and poorly connected. This is in line with Hahn et al. who noted a similar observation. ⁴⁰ Since the notion of global environmental sustainability is widely acknowledged as multidimensional, interpretation of its myriad aspects and variables have taken completely different directions over time and have been continuously handled independently of one another. ² Thus, it is also not surprising that those discussions appear only on the periphery, especially in top‐tier business journals. ⁴¹

At a practical level, it appears that explicit links between sustainability and institutions have not really been made. Most policies related to sustainability are content with linear cause‐effect relationships, ⁴² which do not cover the dynamic complexity of sustainable practices. Most sustainability initiatives either focus on the technological aspect of the environment or on the social aspect of the people, but not both. ¹⁸ Grand sustainability challenges require tailored approaches; thus the discipline needs not only interdisciplinary collaborations, but also problem‐ and policy‐oriented research as well.

Sustainability initiatives could become an integral part of organizational strategy, yet the concept is often not considered by management. To align with sustainability principles, private businesses could shift from a focus on meeting investors' quarterly expectations to a longer‐term orientation. ²³ Private sector organizations could refrain from pursuing profit maximization because there is a limit to a profitable growth. A firm's growth can become detrimental to society, the environment, and even to the firm itself. ²⁷ Overcoming such myopic tendencies unarguably requires radical rethinking and strong leadership.

From the literature review, it is quite obvious that all sectors must collaborate (see Table 2), and a groundswell is needed to start the action. ³³ The question is then who will lead such orchestrated initiatives? Will it be directed by the government? Will private business do it on their own? Should it be generated from the ground up? How can we promote a more long‐term orientation? Or, is this consolidation a mere utopian concept?

The need for boundary‐spanning leadership should also be noted.^35,36,39 Sustainable development should be viewed as a multilayer strategy, not a simplistic view. Thus, sustainability must triangulate not only the public sector and private sector, but also nonprofit organizations as well. Such grand initiatives require directions, alignment, and commitment, regardless of the presence or absence of a formal leader.

Conclusion

In reviewing various aspects of sustainability, it was found that current literature in the business‐focused fields tends to be narrowly focused and poorly connected. The literature also indicates that there is a lack of systematic approaches and a focus that is somewhat incompatible with a dominant research paradigm. There is much to be gained from reopening the debate to take into account a more interdisciplinary field of research and tailored approaches that could focus on the institutions as well as socio‐technical systems.

Inherent in this article are several limitations. First, this review was not meant to be comprehensive; the aim was not to conduct a systematic and rigorous literature review. The review could be expanded to use more holistic approaches and include references from other disciplines, for example engineering, energy, policy, waste management, and so forth.

At the practical level, we are all committed to achieving a new global Agenda 2030, but we have to pursue and commit to the implementation of global environmental sustainability and be eager to take much bolder approaches. On the other hand, the assimilation of SDGs into existing institutional practices challenges conventional and traditional organizations, including those organizations that currently mitigate sustainability issues. To that end, massive and synchronous efforts by public sectors, private businesses, and nonprofit organizations must be mandatory.