Enablers and Tensions of Voluntary Sustainability Standards’ Successful Implementation Process

Abstract

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) aim to encourage organizations to ethical behaviors and solid accountability for their actions, overcoming the inability of other forms of governance to regulate an increasingly globalized organizational world. Recent studies show that many organizations, despite formally adopting VSS, do not successfully implement the requirements. What hinders VSS requirements successful implementation? Given the prominent role of VSS as knowledge transfer tools, we build on insights from the knowledge transfer literature to articulate the VSS implementation process and identify the main barriers affecting the transfer phase (i.e. lack of acceptance of the new knowledge) and the post-transfer phase (i.e. lack of fit between the new knowledge and the context). We then discuss which characteristics of each of the element of knowledge (i.e. of the actors involved, of their relationships, of the VSS and of the context) help overcoming these barriers. What emerges from this framework is that antithetical characteristics of each of these elements are required respectively in the transfer and in the post-transfer phase. We argue that these tensions are responsible for the lack of VSS requirements implementation, and ultimately effectiveness, emerging from the literature. We conclude with the theoretical and practical implications of our work.