Organizational Sustainability Cognition and Its Relationship with Sustainability Performance

Abstract

Three decades after the Brundtland Commission’s report, evidence suggests that the organizations are still unclear about what sustainable development means. Most previous research on organizational sustainability cognition is conceptual and it treats sustainability as ideal-types (business-case frame or paradoxical frame). The very few empirical studies are either restricted by a cross-sectional design or their focus is organizational motivation to pursue sustainability. I analyzed 99 organizational reports of 11 firms in the Textile and Apparel Industry between 2010 and 2019 to find what sustainability means to the firms. For this purpose, I focus on ‘why firms do what they do’ (implicit cognition) instead of ‘what they do’ (explicit behavior). The implicit frames uncover the full breadth of sustainability understanding of firms, which I have thematically organized over the collective action frames (motivational, diagnostic, and prognostic frames). I then empirically argue that existing corporate sustainability benchmarks do not consider the qualitative aspects of sustainability embedded in firms' cognitive perspective. Ignoring these qualitative elements may put the cognitively advance firms at a disadvantage and discourage them from being creative in addressing sustainability challenges. I have identified opportunities for future research at the end of this paper.