Abstract
The historical prevailing paradigms or perceptions are implicit or explicit beliefs that mould our behaviour. Business takes these on in the same way as society. It is not surprising therefore that Management has behaved as if there was infinite resource availability and waste assimilation capacity in nature. Consequently, the loose relationship between economics and the environment, where business accepted one-to-one pollution control strategy supported by legislative controls is a direct consequence of this historical legacy. This dominates industrial thinking in relation to defining good sustainable business practice. 
 
 This paper reviews the perceptions that have arisen from these historical paradigms, “legacies of the past”, giving a reminder of the facts and truths that have somehow become lost in today’s thinking. It goes on to present the set of paradigms that have to be taken on board by corporate management if it is to construct a framework that will allow it to adopt strategic Sustainable Development policies.
Highlights
Legacies of the past, Bhopal in 1984, drew attention to environmental and corporate ethical issues for large corporate business organizations (Guerrette, 1986)
In summary, to be proactive, business has to be guided by a clear description of the salient features of sustainability and of the defining features of practical sustainable development, and to do this it is necessary for business to re-think the perceptions that are imbedded in the current management psyche and accept a new set of paradigms
Any organization has to recognize and accept an almost impossible reality that the present economic reward system is unsustainable and a new structure has to be created in which the economic system is informed and constrained by environmental principles. Accepting this 6th paradigm along with the other five, summarized in Table 1, sustainable economic growth can flourish under the overarching fundamental principle that Total Sustainability (TS) demands that there is no undermining (“negative side effects” Figure 2) of resource availability either environmental or social in any of the processes or systems that are in place in supplying welfare to the population or the individual
Summary
Bhopal in 1984, drew attention to environmental and corporate ethical issues for large corporate business organizations (Guerrette, 1986). An overall strategy based on proactive (feedforward) management, which sets a definitive course towards sustainable development objectives, has to be the way forward This is not entirely new, for proactive management strategies (Robert, 2000) are finding ever-greater application in industry and these measures, with an emphasis on prevention, address such issues as unclosed material loops and unsustainable power generation (Peet, 1992). These will not ensure the long-term sustainability of a company because to seek the more sustainable (OCF, 1987) processing options without an absolute reference point i.e., Total Sustainability (TS) will not produce that. In summary, to be proactive, business has to be guided by a clear description of the salient features of sustainability and of the defining features of practical sustainable development, and to do this it is necessary for business to re-think the perceptions that are imbedded in the current management psyche and accept a new set of paradigms
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