Search results

Alternative enterprises – organizations that operate as a business while still also being driven by a social purpose – are sometimes owned by workers or other stakeholders, rather than shareholders. What role does ownership play in enabling alternative enterprises to prioritize substantively rational organizational values, like environmental sustainability and social equity, over instrumentally rational ones, like profit maximization? We situate this question at the intersection of research on: (1) stakeholder governance and mission drift in both hybrid and collectivist-democratic organizations; and (2) varieties of ownership of enterprise. Though these literatures suggest that ownership affects the ability of alternative enterprises to maintain their social missions, the precise nature of this relationship remains under-theorized. Using the case of a global, social, and environmental values-based banking network, we suggest that alternative ownership is likely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to combat mission drift in enterprises that have a legal owner. A supermajority of this network’s banks deploy alternative ownership structures; those operating with these structures are disproportionately associated with social movements, which imprint their values onto the banks. We show how alternative ownership acts through specific mechanisms to sustain enterprises’ missions, and we also trace how many of these mechanisms are endogenous to alternative ownership models. Finally, we find that ownership models vary in how well they enable the expression and maintenance of these social values. A ladder of mission-sustaining ownership models exists, whereby the dominance of substantive, non-instrumental values over operations and investment becomes increasingly robust as one moves up the rungs from mission-driven investor ownership to special shareholder and member-ownership models.

Corporate governance has experienced numerous changes in chime with the exigencies of the time during which it has been introduced or the context in which it has been practiced. Its gestation can be divided into three stages of development namely the traditional governance, the current transitional governance, and the upcoming sustainable governance. Traditional governance refers to the period hitherto the industrial revolution when corporations have not yet been formed, in today’s sense, but the governance structures were already in place in the existing entities at the time. Transitional governance refers to a period between the industrial revolution and the information age when corporations started to rise as a new economic entity. Reviewing the dominant corporate governance models are integral to understanding the transitional era. At the end of the transitional governance era, a transmogrification in corporate governance is underway to prepare itself for the coming age of sustainability. Sustainable governance integrates the principles of systems thinking and appreciates the complexity of decision-making environment, contrary to its former iterations that welcomed oversimplification of interactive messes (systems of problems). The objective of this chapter is to review corporate governance developmental transition toward sustainable governance and its role in the age of sustainability.

• Development sustainability of economic entities in the modern global universe: stakeholder approach.

• The model of strategy implementation in the field of sustainable development.

• The system of key performance indicators (KPI) in the field of sustainable development.

Development sustainability of economic entities in the modern global universe: stakeholder approach.

The model of strategy implementation in the field of sustainable development.

The system of key performance indicators (KPI) in the field of sustainable development.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

Considering sustainability and resilience together is crucial in food supply chain (FSC) management, as it ensures a balanced approach that meets environmental, economic and social needs while maintaining the system's capacity to withstand disruptions. Towards this, a multi-objective optimisation model is proposed in this study to create an integrated sustainable and resilient FSC. The proposed model employs four objective functions – each representing a dimension of sustainability and one for resilience and utilises an augmented ϵ-constraint method for solving. The findings highlight the interplay between sustainability aspects and resilience, illustrating that overemphasis on any single dimension can adversely affect others. Further, the proposed model is applied to the case of Indian mango pulp supply chain and several inferences are derived. The proposed model would assist decision-makers in making a well-balanced choice based on sustainability and resilience considerations.

Nowadays, social and environmental reporting is approached in different ways, paths and fields by either large-, small-, or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, as demonstrated by previous scholars, SMEs have been critically discussed because they provide lack of proper sustainability disclosure. The fact that the predominant approach of SMEs toward social responsibility is often “sunken” and not “explicit” can drive the lack of disclosure. Furthermore, unstructured communication practices create difficulties in measuring and reporting the sustainability reporting phenomenon in SMEs. The aim of our study is to shed light on the activity of SMEs’ sustainability reporting and disclosure, specifically, by addressing the variables that influence the choice of the guidelines used to prepare sustainability reports.

The research has been carried out by using qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The empirical evidence is based on all the Italian companies, mostly SMEs, that were certified in 2011 as having adopted both environmental (i.e., ISO14001 or EMAS) and social (i.e., SA8000) management systems. A multivariate linear regression model has been developed to address the influence of several variables (i.e., financial performance, size, time after achievement of the certifications, group/conglomerate control, etc.) on the guidelines’ choice for preparing sustainability reports.

Our findings demonstrate that SMEs prefer to use simple guidelines such as those guidelines that are mandatory under management system certifications. However, the sustainability disclosure driven by the adoption of international guidelines may be more complex if the SME is controlled within a group of companies or if a significant amount of time has passed since the certification date. As such, we developed a taxonomy of their different behavioral drivers according to a legitimacy theory approach.

At this stage, our study didn’t focus on the contents’ quality of the disclosure and reporting practices adopted by SMEs, which is obviously a worthwhile and important area for further research. Furthermore, the analysis took into account the impact of a number of easily accessible variables; therefore, it can be extended to investigate the effect on disclosure of other relevant variables (i.e., nature of the board of directors, age, and industrial sector in which the company operates) as well as contexts prevailing in other countries.

The study represents an important contribution for understanding how and why managers might use externally focused disclosure on social and environmental issues to benefit the company’s legitimacy.

Our study provides interesting insights for policy makers who require social or environmental certification when calling for tenders or specific EU contracts, in order to put aside the “brand” or “symbol” and really focus on the disclosed practices.

Previous studies have provided only a few evidence about reporting practices and related influencing features of SMEs’ sustainability actions. As such, the study wishes to make a significant contribution to the existing literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by providing relevant insights about the factors which influence the guidelines used by SMEs in preparing their sustainability reports.

Mexico currently faces serious social scarcities and businesses are under pressure. The alternative lies in improving company performance through education. It is important to educate future entrepreneurs and managers within a corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework and expose them to the stakeholder theory. This chapter argues that educating socially responsible management students is the touchstone strategy for addressing the big challenges that twenty first century organizations face. This chapter first defines the CSR concept, relating it to organizations’ role in fulfilling society’s expectations, demands, and requirements. Second, it sets forth why CSR is a strategic tool for management and a moral obligation for companies. Finally, it argues for the importance of including CSR and the stakeholder theory in the curriculum of all management faculties and programs.