Abstract
“Corporate Environmental Sustainability” has become a widely used term. It implies that an individual firm has the capacity to effectively manage and control the harm inflicted upon the natural environment by its processes, products and business models – a notion we refer to as an organization’s “manageability of environmental impact”. This paper argues that the organization-level concept of corporate sustainability cannot be meaningfully discussed unless it is understood in light of three conditions: market growth dynamics, ecosystems complexity, and supply chain structure. These economic, ecological and industry-organizational conditions outside the organization’s boundaries severely limit an organization’s manageability of its environmental impact, suggesting that the cheerfully optimistic connotations of the concept “corporate sustainability” must be tempered accordingly. Using market growth rates and environmental impact manageability, we develop four scenarios to further illustrate the dynamics and challenges to sustainability in each setting, and derive implications for management research and practice. KEywORDS Corporate Environmental Sustainability, Market Growth, Environmental Impact, Ecosystems,
Highlights
Much has been written in the management literature over the last 20 years on the principles of corporate environmental sustainability and how to achieve it (Etzion; Marcus and Fremeth; Schaltegger et al.; Schmidheiny; Shrivastava; Starik and Rands)
We argue that any efforts to effectively, i.e., “sustainably”, align the firm’s environmental impacts with the cycles and dynamics of the natural environment must account for a number of factors that have been largely ignored in the literature on corporate environmental sustainability
We propose that a number of economic, ecological and industry-organizational factors act as critical constraints on a firm’s ability to sustainably align its impacts with nature, yet have received virtually no attention by environmental management scholars: (1) the evolution and dynamics of the markets in which the firm competes, market growth and market size, and (2) the ability of a firm to manage its environmental impact as a function of the complexity of ecological systems and the position of a firm in the supply chain
Summary
Stefano; Micale, Valerio; and Winn, Monika (2011) "Corporate Environmental Sustainability Beyond Organizational Boundaries: Market Growth, Ecosystems Complexity and Supply Chain Structure as Co-Determinants of Environmental Impact," Journal of Environmental Sustainability: Vol 1: Iss. 1, Article 4. Corporate Environmental Sustainability Beyond Organizational Boundaries: Market Growth, Ecosystems Complexity and Supply Chain Structure as Co-Determinants of Environmental Impact. This paper argues that the organization-level concept of corporate sustainability cannot be meaningfully discussed unless it is understood in light of three conditions: market growth dynamics, ecosystems complexity, and supply chain structure. These economic, ecological and industry-organizational conditions outside the organization’s boundaries severely limit an organization’s manageability of its environmental impact, suggesting that the cheerfully optimistic connotations of the concept “corporate sustainability” must be tempered .
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