Sustainability in Family and Nonfamily Businesses in the Wine Industry

Abstract

The implementation of environmentally sustainable initiatives within organizations is a shared research topic across both sustainability and family business research. Using a case study approach, this paper provides an in-depth exploration of the presence, role, and strategic nature of environmentally sustainable processes within the Chilean wine industry. Our interview process resulted in 21 interviews between July and November of 2014. Our findings suggest that the recognized tendency of family firms to both engage in and benefit from sustainability practices may not only be owed to their desire to preserve family socio-emotional wealth, but also the unique ability to better incorporate, apply, and effectively benefit from such investments. These findings extend previous work in this area by recognizing additional processes necessary for the development of proactive sustainability practices which are not considered using the motivation-based schema common in extant work. Our findings are analyzed and discussed as they relate to both family business and sustainability research and serve as a bridge between these two related research domains.