Abstract
International awareness and demands for sustainable development have pushed the sustainability narrative into the forefront of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As a result, the call for sustainable business practices has never been greater. While businesses are both needed and eager to contribute to sustainable development, current literature lacks insights into how businesses can practice sustainability. This paper aims to fill this gap and develop an understanding of the different categories of sustainability practices that firms adopt, and the potentials and challenges associated with them. Based on a qualitative multiple case study, we identify four categories of sustainability practices including inspiring and informing, productizing, co-creating and system building. We integrate these findings into a sustainability maturity typology, proposing that these four practices are associated with an increasing intensity of sustainability intention, so that firms realize increasing levels of sustainability in the focal business practices as they move from inspiring and informing through to system building. The article concludes by arguing that there is no generic “one size fits all” approach to support sustainability practices as approaches need to fit a firm’s sustainability maturity.
Highlights
The realities of climate change, social injustices, poverty, migration and hunger are increasingly pressing themselves on our collective understanding
Our study adds to the existing literature by introducing four overall categories of sustainability practices including inspiring and informing, productizing, co-creating and system building; and identifying the opportunities and challenges related to the practices. We summarize these findings in a sustainability maturity model indicating that the four categories represent a progression towards practices with an increasing intensity of sustainability, so that firms realize increasing levels of sustainability in the focal business practices as they move from inspiring and informing through productizing and co-creation to system building
We introduce the four categories of sustainability practices, namely inspire and inform; productize; co-create; and system building. We outline both the potentials that incite the firms to transition towards more mature sustainability practices and the challenges experienced in the transitions
Summary
The realities of climate change, social injustices, poverty, migration and hunger are increasingly pressing themselves on our collective understanding. Motivations for doing so vary and may combine a number of issues including the pursuit of potentially profitable environmental opportunities, hedging against future backlash from the public, or addressing intrinsic social missions. This occurs through e.g., experiments with new business models, new modes of production, new ways of marketing or new supply chains in ways that seek to generate more social value and less environmental stress from business activities. The attention given to sustainability in the public debate opens the possibility of firms engaging in superficial sustainability practices for purely marketing purposes, sometimes referred to as “greenwashing” [13]
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