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The purpose of this commissioned paper is to offer some personal reflections on sustainability within the hospitality industry.

The paper opens by identifying sustainability as a teasing paradox for the hospitality industry and a short discussion of the characteristics of sustainability. It then explores the growing interest in corporate sustainability and offers a review of the range of academic research into sustainability within the hospitality industry literature. More generally, the authors suggest three fundamental sets of issues that currently face the industry, namely, defining sustainability within the industry, materiality and independent external assurance and sustainable consumption and the industry’s commitment to continuing economic growth.

In addressing these three sets of issues, the authors make a number of suggestions. First that definitions of sustainability within the hospitality industry can be interpreted as being constructed around business imperatives rather than an ongoing commitment to sustainability. Second that materiality and external assurance are not treated comprehensively within the industry, which undermines the credibility of the sustainability reporting process. Third that the concept of sustainable consumption and any critique of the industry’s commitment to economic growth are conspicuous by their absence in the both the research literature on sustainability and in sustainability reporting within the industry.

The paper suggests that the hospitality industry may need to examine how it defines sustainability, to extend its sustainability reporting to embrace materiality and external assurance and to address the issues of sustainable consumption and continuing economic growth if it is to demonstrate a worthwhile and enduring commitment to sustainability.

The paper provides some accessible personal reflections on sustainability within the hospitality industry and, as such, it will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners interested in the hospitality industry and more widely within the business and management community.

The purpose of this practice briefing paper is to provide an exploratory review of the sustainability agendas being addressed and publicly reported by the UK's leading data centre operators.

The paper begins with a short discussion of the characteristics of sustainability and an outline of the origins and development of data centres within the UK. The paper draws its empirical material from the most recent information on sustainability posted on the UK's leading data centre operators' corporate web sites.

The findings reveal that all the UK's leading data centre operators provide only limited information on their commitment to sustainability with the dominant focus being on its environmental dimension and with little attention being paid to social and economic issues. More critically the authors argue that these commitments are driven more by the search for efficiency gains, that they are couched within existing business models centred on continuing growth and that as such the UK's leading data centre operators are pursuing a “weak” rather than a “strong” model of sustainability.

The paper suggests that leading data centre operating companies may need to extend their sustainability reporting and to introduce external assurance procedures.

The paper provides an accessible review of the sustainability agendas being pursued by the UK's leading data centre operators and as such it will interest academics, students and practitioners interested in both sustainability and data centre operations and developments.

This brief note sheds light on the links between Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

Three alternative methods based on keyword overlap to establish links between SDGs and JEL codes are presented.

These simple linkages illustrate that the themes of SDGs have corresponding closely related JEL classification codes.

The mappings presented in this note are based on simple keyword overlap and are therefore necessarily imperfect and incomplete. There is plenty of room for further development.

Despite the demonstrated possibility of linking SDGs to existing JEL codes, introducing a specific JEL code for each SDG would reduce search costs for those searching for economic research related to specific SDGs.

The first and preliminary attempt to link SDGs and JEL codes.

The aims of this paper are to provide an exploratory general review of both the sustainability agendas being publicly reported by the world's leading retailers and the nature of the reporting process and to offer some wider reflections on the ways these retailers are currently addressing and pursuing sustainability agendas.

The paper begins with a short discussion of the characteristics of sustainability. The paper draws its empirical material from the most recent sustainability reports and information posted on the internet by eight of the world's top ten retailers.

The findings reveal that while there is considerable variation in the structure of the retailers' sustainability reports, three broad sets of themes can be identified. Namely, the environmental, social and economic issues the retailers report on, how these issues are reported, and the role and importance of sustainability within companies and to their business. More critically, it is argued that the world's leading retailers are, at best, adopting a “weak” model of sustainability and that in pursuing continuing growth they are ignoring the fact that the present patterns of consumption are unsustainable in the long term.

The paper provides an accessible review of, and some reflections on, the sustainability agendas being pursued by some of the world's leading retailers and as such it will interest academics and those working in management positions within the retail industry.