How organizational logics shape trade-off decision-making in sustainability

Abstract

Tensions between economic, environmental, and social performance are inherent to the practice of corporate sustainability. These sustainability tensions present the company with strategic choices. Using an organizational cognition perspective, we posit that companies interpret and respond to these tensions in ways that reflect an underlying collective sustainability logic. The purpose of this research is to explore this link, and to describe the logics that companies use when approaching sustainability tensions—and in doing so, explore what this reveals about the nature of the logics themselves. To achieve this, we perform a qualitative content analysis of interviews with sustainability managers, as well as archival documents. We find that all companies, regardless of their sustainability logic, encounter tensions in the practice of sustainability. In navigating these tensions, companies following a market-led logic tended to consider a narrow scope of stakeholder interests in their sustainability decision-making. These companies also followed a mutually-exclusive (and unintegrated) ‘if/then’ approach to sustainability tensions. On the other hand, companies that followed a holistic logic tended to consider a much wider scope of stakeholders and displayed a higher degree of integration in their logic (i.e., synergetic approach to decision-making around tensions).