Abstract
While sustainability has attracted the attention of managers and academicians for over two decades, the macro-level indicators of sustainability are not moving in the right direction. Climate change continues to be an existential threat for humanity and other indicators of sustainability do not fare much better. The logic of the business case and the associated framing of tension between financial outcomes and sustainability have generated a limited and inadequate response to the existential challenges before humanity today. In this essay, we analyze the evolution of sustainability in the business context and call for a recognition that social and environmental outcomes must supersede economic ones in corporate sustainability thinking. We call for a widening of the spatial, temporal, and moral lenses in the formulation and execution of business strategy to ensure that it is in alignment with the needs of current and future generations of humanity and proportionate to planetary conditions.
Highlights
The extreme challenges faced by society and the planet that sustains it, the health of which our business sector is entirely dependent upon, clearly compel significant and deep changes to our strategic management mindsets and practices
This disconnect between societal sustainability needs and current strategic-management thinking may be attributed to the historical underpinnings of growth-oriented neo-classical economics (e.g., [1,2,3]) and the business paradigms based on its foundations
We have argued that corporate sustainability thinking and practices have been limited because of a dominant economic paradigm that prioritizes economic factors and financial results over the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability
Summary
The extreme challenges faced by society and the planet that sustains it, the health of which our business sector is entirely dependent upon, clearly compel significant and deep changes to our strategic management mindsets and practices. Relatively little change is evident in the strategic mindsets that guide most companies This disconnect between societal sustainability needs and current strategic-management thinking may be attributed to the historical underpinnings of growth-oriented neo-classical economics (e.g., [1,2,3]) and the business paradigms based on its foundations. This leads us to identify an urgent need to imbue our strategic management frameworks and analytic tools with a more holistic, systems-level perspective. [12] warns against “absurdly strong sustainability”, which would hold that natural capital must be maintained as intact without compromise He notes that absurdly strong sustainability will limit the resources needed to advance socio-economic progress, subjecting the poor and hungry to continued poverty, hunger, and little hope. It could represent a genuine profound shift or merely a result of waning trust in corporations and an exercise in corporate hypocrisy lacking alignment between talk and action [40]
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