Abstract
Sustainability addresses environmental and social issues affecting this and future generations. When family businesses perceive that the community is disrupted, recognize an environmental problem and respond by implementing new environmental policies or regulations, the family business’s socio-emotional values press to transition to a more sustainable production system, such as the ‘Circular Economy.’ Drawing on the Dubin (1978) methodology—a paradigm for building models through deduction—we design a sustainable model, which shows family businesses’ responses to changes in the environment. It explains the reasons why family firms transition to the Circular Economy, based on the theory of Socio-Emotional Wealth (SEW). We check the model through the case study of the food retail leader in the Spanish market—Mercadona—which applies policies about energy, resources and waste to become a Circular Economy business model. Because of the strong family character of Mercadona, this case can be useful for the decision-making of other family businesses.
Highlights
Sustainability addresses environmental and socioeconomic issues affecting this and future generations [1,2]
An ethical or normative view of the world urges us to embrace a holistic view of what a good society should be [11,12], global concerns have been raised about environmental issues
While economic sustainability has been defined as maintenance of capital [13], environmental sustainability seeks to improve human welfare and social sustainability by protecting the sources of raw materials used for human needs and limiting dumping of human wastes in order to prevent harm to human beings [14]
Summary
Sustainability addresses environmental and socioeconomic issues affecting this and future generations [1,2]. The European Commission has adopted an ambitious new Circular Economy (CE) Package to help European businesses and consumers to make the transition to a stronger and more CE where resources are used in a more sustainable way. Our research goal is to determine the situation of family businesses relative to environmental sustainability by analyzing how their unique characteristics could affect implementation of CE using the Socio-Emotional wealth approach (SEW). We aim to identify what factors derived from family character could speed transition to this economic model This is the first model applied to the family business that introduces the concept of environmental sustainability through CE. We seek to introduce the new paradigm to family business decision makers
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