Embracing Tensions in Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

Corporate sustainability is rife with tensions as firms seek to balance often divergent economic, social, and environmental goals. To assess how tensions have been addressed in past research and to identify promising areas for pushing the literature forward, we conduct a comprehensive review of research in corporate sustainability from the past 11 years. We note four general approaches to how tensions are examined: through a win-win, trade-off, integrative, or paradox lens. The win-win approach looks for opportunities to reconcile social and/or environmental goals with economic goals, thus bypassing tensions, whereas a trade-off approach views such goals as being in conflict and requires that a choice be made between them. We find that scholars have also used an integrative approach to bring balance to the three elements of sustainability. More recently, a paradox approach, which seeks to understand the nature of tensions along with how actors work through them, provides an opportunity to evaluate complex sustainability issues and generate creative approaches to them. We call on scholars to build on paradox research, which explicitly addresses tensions in sustainability, and to extend conceptual work through empirical studies.