Sustainability Management Academics

Abstract

Dear Colleagues and Readers, I am very pleased to present to you our second sustainability management-reoriented special issue of Organization & Environment (O&E), part of an endeavor my coeditor, Alberto AragonCorea, the SAGE publishing staff, and I have been planning since last summer. As you can see from the table of contents, we have several articles and an essay (all double-blind, peer-reviewed) that span a wide range of intriguing sustainability management topics. Leading off, in “Proactive Environmental Strategies and Employee Inclusion: The Positive Effects of Sharing Information and Promoting Collaboration and the Influence of Uncertainty,” J. Alberto Aragon-Corea, Inmaculada Martin-Tapia, and Nuria Hurtado-Torres provide a rigorous and interesting assessment of the connections between environmental sustainability strategies and information sharing and collaboration. Using a sample of developed country pharmaceutical firms, they identified positive relationships between firm environmental strategy, on the one hand, and information sharing and employee collaboration in those firms, on the other. Second, in “The Coevolution of Sustainable Strategic Management in the Global Marketplace,” Jean and Ed Stead discuss the design and implementation of organizational strategies that have the capacity to address both socioeconomic and environmental sustainability in developed, developing, and undeveloped societal contexts. Among their contributions is a spiral model of the coevolution of the field of strategic management and the environmental turbulence within and between those several societal contexts over time. Third, in “Organizational Learning and the Sustainability Community of Practice: The Role of Boundary Objects,” Suzanne Benn, Melissa Edwards, and Tamsin Angus-Leppan employ an established organizational learning framework to the sustainability aspects of the higher education sector in Australia. In addition to a pilot study on their topic and in that geographic context, they illustrate the use of an interesting stakeholder conceptual mapping tool and a multilevel model of integrating “communities of practice” with intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing processes. Fourth, in “Business, Ecosystems, and Biodiversity: New Horizons for Management Research,” Monika Winn and Stefano Pogutz highlight a number of instances of business programs that are intended to advance the health of ecosystems within which they are embedded. They also suggest several other possibilities for advancing and preserving biodiversity by business and forward multiple suggestions on future management research efforts exploring these and similar themes. Drawing especially on the field of ecological economics, they, too, offer a