Business Collective Action for Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

Business collective action (BCA) is often necessary to address sustainability issues, which are generally complex and multi-layered issues that cannot always be properly addressed by individual businesses. Firms participating in BCA for corporate sustainability have access to clearer rules and guidelines for managing sustainability issues, are more efficient in managing multiple stakeholder demands due to enhanced opportunities for learning, benefit from individual and joint reputation management, and are better able to capture weak signals about opportunities and threats in the external environment. Despite these benefits, our understanding of BCA for corporate sustainability is still limited. Most of the existing work in this area has examined different forms of BCA for corporate sustainability – for example, multi-stakeholder initiatives, trade associations, and other forms of business membership organizations – individually. In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of BCA for corporate sustainability. The authors start the chapter by discussing the importance of BCA in general and BCA for corporate sustainability, in particular to research and practice, and its benefits to firms and society. The authors then present a typology of the different forms of BCA for corporate sustainability, discussing their differences and similarities from an issues management perspective. The authors conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of future research in this area.

Citation

Vidal, N.G. and Van Buren III, H. (2020), "Business Collective Action for Corporate Sustainability", Wasieleski, D.M. and Weber, J. (Ed.) Sustainability (Business and Society 360, Vol. 4), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 123-139. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2514-175920200000004007