Sustainable and responsible business: focal cases, sectors and contexts

Citation

Stokes, D.P., Moore, D.N., Brooks, D.S. and Wells, P.C.a.J. (2013), "Sustainable and responsible business: focal cases, sectors and contexts", EuroMed Journal of Business, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/EMJB-05-2013-0029

Sustainable and responsible business: focal cases, sectors and contexts

Article Type: Guest editorial From: EuroMed Journal of Business, Volume 8, Issue 3

In recent decades sustainable and responsible business and management has become a pressing issue for academics and practitioners (Elkington, 1997; EFMD, 2010; Milne et al., 2006; Sharma et al., 2007; Banerjee and Shastri, 2010; Berners-Lee, 2010; PRME, 2012). In the contemporary era, there is now a move to take stock and distil the progress accomplished in relation to, and the status of, the domain(s). It is with this objective in mind that this special issue has been assembled. The papers within this collection provide a range of insights into extant and evolving cases, sectors and contexts pertaining to the field in the European and wider global context.

There are potentially a number of features which may be worthwhile, prima facie, surfacing in relation to the field as it stands. Central to the concerns of much research is the issue of actual impact of the work and examinations conducted in the field. In some cases, impact may take the form of commenting and revealing issues and practices occurring among organizations and business practitioners. Certainly, among academic commentators there is a sense that the writing on issues should lead to the consideration of consequences and the generation of achievable and realistic outcomes. On occasion, this might take forms of direct action and perhaps PRME is one such illustration of such ambition to talk more meaningfully to commercial interests. Of equal importance, is the role of educating and opening up new vistas in relation to ideas, and, moreover, therein perhaps resides a commensurate responsibility to future generations. This latter laudable notion has been an underlying thrust of discussion in sustainable and responsible business writing.

Allied to the idea of looking ahead, it is also useful here to embrace this idea more fully in the form of overt futurism, that is to say, the idea of envisaging the future. Researchers should be concerned with predicting the future and trying to imagine the future. This means that they might attempt to “paint” pictures of the landscapes in which coming epochs and issues might be played out. This may involve developing scenarios about possible trajectories and pathways in the future – strategic foresight. We need some tools to be able to approach these issues. In projecting towards future scenarios debates of sustainability invoke Doomsday scenarios or, in direct contrast, hopes for Utopian solutions and settings.

We may also turn to the question of the nature of the field, or area, of sustainable and responsible business per se – what is sustainable and responsible management? Indeed, the emergent field effectively borrows from many other disciplines – for example, sociology, environmental science, geography and so on and so forth and it is a therefore a question of what is considered to reside within the domain and what is not? Moreover, how and where is it important to tap and manage the information flows that occur around the subject? Clearly therefore, any examination of sustainable and responsible business is likely de facto also to raise the question of the authenticity of the area and endeavour – it is an area that has emerged from, and inherently is comprised of, other disciplines.

Therefore, if we begin to challenge the organic and ongoing conceptualization of the field then we might approach this issue by reflecting on how the parameters of time and space play out in relation to sustainable and responsible business. By this, we might consider how differing sensemaking may take place between different national cultures or different corporate cultures. Moreover, how might these change and transform over time. For instance, what passed as acceptable with regard to sustainable and responsible business conduct 20 or even ten years ago may not now be acceptable. Clearly, a further and important boundary that emerges here is the oft-commented academic-practitioner divide which appears to be prevalent in Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Given these issues and concerns, much of the debate has taken place against a backdrop of seeking and evaluating political and radical alternatives. These discussions have raised the possibility of challenging cultural, economic and predominant assumptions and paradigms, such as, for example, free market capitalism. This strand of debate points at the question – what is the purpose of business? There may well be a competing set of views on this as certain audiences focus on the metrics of developing market share and profit while other public audiences and academic commentators frequently underline the idea and belief that there should also be some social benefits.

How should we respond to the above issues? What methods will lead us beyond commentary and into action? One option, amongst a broad range of possibilities, is to provide collections of insights that drill down into detailed analyses of the issues of sustainability and responsibility in order to generate rich case studies. It is with this ambition that special issue has been assembled.

The collection opens with a paper by Rowland and Hall entitled “Perceived unfairness in appraisal: engagement and sustainable organizational performance”. This looks at the central issue of organizational justice and fairness in relation to performance appraisal. The authors problematize the sustainability of the extant situation and provide an examination of the concept of organizational justice and how the difficulties and challenges of many contemporary approaches might be progressed in a more responsible manner. This paper provides empirical case data and assists in illustrating some of the potential limits and boundaries of the domain and serves to show that the field of sustainable and responsible business is potentially extensive and expansive in nature.

The subsequent paper is “Remuneration of management in the financial crisis – a study of the 2009 annual reports of the Euro Stoxx 50 companies” by Britzelmaier, Doll, Häberle and Kraus. This paper examines the vital, controversial and provocative issue of pay for senior executive pay in relation to the German and European context. This has been a potent matter that has preoccupied many column inches of the press and media airtime and is therefore prescient in popular attention during recent years. The sustainability, or not, of current practices is worthy of detailed examination in the present issue.

Having introduced the topic of sustainable and responsible management through two contemporary illustrations the special issue then takes a reflective move in order to examine the wider context in relation to the sphere. At this juncture, Caulfield provides a study that highlights the fact that while businesses have been a major influence on society since before the industrial revolution, most academic literature on the social responsibility of business focuses on activity of the globalized multi-national corporations in the later twentieth century. His paper aims to extend analysis in the field by considering the historical dimension and evolution of corporate social responsibilities (CSR) from Medieval Guilds, Elizabethan Merchants, and Manufacturers of the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on Weber's notion of the ideal-type, this paper demonstrates that many concepts in “modern” strategic CSR such as codes of conduct and corporate philanthropy have considerable lineage. The paper concludes that CSR decisions of today's corporations could be re-interpreted as a mimetic selection from a repertoire of strategies developed by commercial ancestors over the last 500 years.

The issue progresses by focusing on Munif's study on “Corporate accountability in the context of sustainability – a literature review”. This paper reviews the literature on frameworks for corporate accountability and why these are failing the environment, society and business. The work is valuable in drawing out the time and space dimensions in the current literature that often point commentary towards a narrow range of economic metrics. The argument proposes that CSR initiatives are generally a weak attempt to respond and counterbalance these effects and behaviours. The paper proposes an approach that will evaluate classic measures and provide novel and valuable responsible and sustainable practices. As such it seeks to adjust the current assumptions and paradigms that may drive much of the corporate thinking behind sustainability.

The final paper changes the focus more explicitly towards the linked issues of sustainability and CSR (“Explicating dynamic capabilities for corporate sustainability: evidence from corporate social responsibility reports” by Wu, He and Duan). The discussion examines and identifies reasons for differences in corporate commitments to sustainability and roots these in dynamic capabilities for corporate sustainability. The study is founded on an interesting and insightful content analysis of the CSR reports of major UK companies.

Overall, the collection provides and original set of detailed cases that highlight various aspects of the evolving paradigm of sustainable and responsible business. Clearly, the field will continue to need multiple and varied cases akin to those presented in this issue. This collection adds useful and pertinent examples in pursuit of exploring and elaborating the field.

Dr Peter Stokes, Dr Neil Moore, Dr Simon Brooks, Paul Caulfield and Jessica Wells
Guest Editors

References

Banerjee, P. and Shastri, V. (2010), Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability in Business, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Berners-Lee, M. (2010), How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, Profile Books Ltd, London

EFMD (2010), The Sustainable Business, European Foundation for Management Development, Brussels

Elkington, J. (1997), Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business, Capstone, London

Milne, M., Kearins, K. and Walton, S. (2006), “Creating adventure in wonderland: the journey metaphor and environmental sustainability”, Organization, Vol. 13 No. 6, pp. 801-839

PRME (2012), “Principles for Responsible Management Education (2011)”, available at: www.unprme.org (accessed 6 March)

Sharma, S., Starik, M. and Husted, B. (2007), Organizations and Sustainability Mosaic: Crafting Long-Term Ecological and Societal Solutions, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham