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This chapter forwards a justification, an explanation, and numerous examples related to an emerging integrated sustainability management theory and its connections to other management theories and key-related concepts including systems and immersion. An integrated approach to sustainability solutions presents several implications for educators, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, including the need to consider urgent and immediate responses that address sustainability crises at multiple levels and in multiple systems. This chapter is intended to promote reflection, dialogue, and a collective call to action to secure a sustainable world for present and future generations.

Purpose – As a well-recognized qualitative research method, storytelling can help to explain the multilevel and dynamic perspectives in management studies. The authors purposefully chose sustainability stories in the Western context, leadership stories in the Eastern context, and entrepreneurship stories in the West-meets-East context to highlight the benefits of using storytelling in conducting strategy and management research.

Design/Method/Approach – Qualitative research, field research, and comparative analysis.

Findings – Looking through cultural and philosophical lenses, the authors argue that scholars need to pay attention to research contexts when applying storytelling in their fieldwork. Storytelling can help to unpack the contextual factors, especially to disclose dynamics and complexity issues of strategic management phenomena.

Research implications – While storytelling has been widely used in the Western management context, the authors believe we are among the first to suggest that storytelling can become an insightful and fruitful research method in Eastern management and in combined cultural contexts, and hence, they are attempting to potentially help to advance theory development.

Originality/Value – Two applicable conditions for storytelling are discussed, namely, the multilevel/systems perspective and the dynamic perspective, which are illustrated by sustainability, leadership, and entrepreneurship research in both Western and Eastern contexts.

Universities and colleges, as societal educational institutions, have relatively recently attempted to begin to upgrade their multiple relationships with their natural environments, as have other institutions. However, “greening” initiatives of higher education institutions appear to have received far less attention in various bodies of academic literature than have the environmental policies and practices of these other institutions. This article highlights four US universities’ “campus ecology” projects, initially characterizing major elements of each, using a common organizational effectiveness model which has been widely employed in organization‐related academic fields.

Calls for corporate social responsibility are widespread, yet there is no consensus about what it means; this may be its charm. However, it is possible to distinguish the fi duciary obligations owed to shareholders, as expressed by Milton Friedman, from all other paradigms of corporate responsibility. Friedman maintains that: “ ...there is one and only one social responsibility of business‐to‐use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.” All other paradigms argue that corporations have social responsibilities that extend beyond the pursuit of shareholder benefits to stakeholders. The list of cited stakeholders is ill‐defined and expanding, including non‐human animals and non‐sentient things. This paper defends the intellectual and ethical merits of fiduciary duties, and compares and contrasts it to the stakeholder paradigm. The fiduciary duty to firms’ owners is the bedrock of capitalism, and capitalism will wither without it.

The environment continues to command serious attention as a key consideration in the corporate strategy process, both within the specialised environmental management literature and increasingly from the general management literature (Avila and Whitehead 1993, Porter and van der Linde 1993, Shrivastava 1992). One important area of academic examination is that of corporate environmental behaviour.

Welcome to the eighth volume of Research Methodology in Strategy and Management. The theme of this volume is West Meets East: Building Theoretical Bridges. It complements the seventh volume West Meets East: Toward Methodological Exchange. The two volumes together examine the relevance of Western theories and methods in the Eastern research context. In particular, this volume examines the key theoretical areas that strategic management research draws from to understand how managers can lead their companies to achieve competitive advantage in the increasingly globalised economy. We not only focus on the extent to which theories developed in the West can be applied in the understanding of business practice and performance in the East, but also explore methods for developing new insights and theories rooted in the Eastern business practice.

Organizations are partly responsible for the pollution in the world and are expected to contribute towards curbing climate change. Despite the growing importance of the environmental aspect of corporate social responsibility (CSR), i.e. corporate environmental responsibility (CER), current literature focuses more on its antecedents and outcomes rather than drilling deeper into the essential elements of the concept. This has resulted in conceptual confusion as researchers use different aspects to define, understand and measure CER. Hence, this study aims to identify the critical dimensions of CER from a practitioner’s point of view.

Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior sustainability professionals across top Bombay Stock Exchange-indexed organizations in India. Manual content analysis and the Gioia method were used to arrive at the findings.

The critical components of CER are as follows: encompassing environmental responsibility mindset; optimized resource consumption; neutral water, energy and air status; multi-level environmental responsibility approach and targets; compliance, disclosure, reporting and policy formation; and green supply chain.

Our research introduces a comprehensive framework of dimensions to study, measure and represent CER, addressing a critical gap in the current literature. The authors identify and propose novel dimensions, such as the CER mindset and a multi-level approach, which are essential for a holistic understanding of CER. These dimensions, presently absent in academic definitions, render existing research based on those definitions incomplete. Integrating these new dimensions will significantly enhance the rigor and relevance of CER studies, offering a more robust foundation for future research and practical application.