Assessment of Ibn Haldun's Model for Sustainability using Structural Equation Modelling

Abstract

This work firstly aims to develop a sustainability model based on Ibn Haldun’s teaching of sustainability. Religious coloring refers to the spirituality, which is re-discovered in modern ages and transferred to the workplace. Spirituality stimulates virtuousness at personal and organizational level, which in turn generates managerial sustainability meaning the lifespan of a company. While personal virtuousness refers social ethics, organizational level virtuousness could be considered as Corporate Social Responsibility. Secondly, it attempts to evaluate the relevance of Ibn Haldun’s approach to contemporary business organizations. In order to demonstrate the relationship between spirituality, virtuousness, CSR, and sustainability; data collected from Corporate Knights’ Global 100 companies were analyzed using structural equation modelling. According to the results, while workplace spirituality leads to ethical conduct and higher CSR/CS score, the relationship between spirituality or CSR/CS and financial performance is not significant. However, it seems that higher lifespan of business enterprises is related to their CSR/CS score.