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This study investigates how organizations in Brazil address sustainability concerns through collaborative governance efforts with strategic stakeholders. Organizations from New Zealand were considered as benchmarks for comparison.

This study is based on a qualitative exploratory research, supported by semistructured interviews. Ten organizations are interviewed, five from each country. Thematic analysis is used to analyze the interview data. Central management practices adopted by organizations are presented, and the goals, benefits, and limitations associated with collaborative initiatives are investigated.

The findings reveal that organizations in Brazil and in New Zealand are employing similar management and sustainability practices. Companies in both countries observe that collaborative efforts with strategic stakeholders improve their ability to meet market demands and jointly develop innovative solutions toward sustainability goals while exchanging knowledge and enhancing their operational effectiveness. Organizations perceive a number of tangible and nontangible value creation outcomes from sustainability practices, such as brand and reputational gains, improved supply chain management, and risk management attainments. The results also present limitations, such as internal limitations of organizations concerning how their executives and general staff incorporate sustainability issues into their organizations’ strategic planning and operational decisions.

Market pressures toward greener and more responsible operations equally affected organizations in both countries, without differentiation in operation between an emerging country such as Brazil and a developed country such as New Zealand. Directions for future research are presented. These are based on how organizations measure sustainability outcomes of management practices and collaborative alliances, and how organizations map upcoming market demands and opportunities to deliver more value to society as the sustainable development debate continues to evolve.

Business sustainability urges firms to simultaneously address economic, ecological, and social concerns. It innately combines different potentially competing organizational elements. Therefore, sustainability represents a suitable context for the study and practice of hybridity. Based on an understanding of hybridity as a continuum, in this chapter, the author distinguish between four different forms of hybridity for business sustainability, depending on the degree of integration and autonomy of sustainability initiatives in business organizations. With ceremonial hybridity, businesses only leave the impression to pursue business and sustainability goals but focus their practices on conventional business priorities. Contingent hybridity denotes an approach where ecological and social concerns are only pursued to the extent that they align with business goals. With peripheral hybridity, firms pursue sustainability initiatives in their own right but do not integrate them with core business activities. Full hybridity puts both business as well as sustainability at the core of the organization without emphasizing one over the other. These different forms of hybridity in business sustainability are illustrated with examples from various business organizations. By characterizing different degrees of hybridity in business sustainability, the argument and the examples highlight how organizational hybridity and business sustainability can fruitfully inform one another. The author develop research opportunities for using business sustainability as a context for studying different degrees as well as the dynamics of hybrid organizing and for using different degrees of hybridity for achieving a better understanding of different pathways toward substantive business contributions to sustainable development.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate whether a firm’s cost structure (specifically, its cost stickiness) is associated with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability factors of performance and disclosure.

Methodology/approach – This study uses MCSI Research KLD Stats (KLD) and Bloomberg databases for the 13-year period from 2003 to 2015 in constructing ESG performance and disclosure variables, respectively. The authors adopt the general cost stickiness models from Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003) and Banker, Basu, Byzalov, and Chen (2016) to perform the analysis.

Findings – The authors find that a firm’s level of cost stickiness is positively associated with certain sticky corporate social responsibility (CSR)/ESG activities (both overall and when separately classified as strengths or concerns) but not with other nonsticky CSR activities. The authors also show that the association between cost stickiness and ESG disclosure is incrementally stronger for firms with CSR activities classified as sticky. Furthermore, the authors provide evidence that ESG disclosure is greater when both cost stickiness and the degree of sticky CSR activities increase. The authors show that when cost stickiness is high and CSR activities are sticky, management has incentives to increase CSR/ESG sustainability disclosure to decrease information asymmetry.

Originality/value – The findings present new evidence to understand how management integrates cost management strategies with various dimensions of sustainability performance decisions and show that not all ESG activities are equally effective when it comes to cost stickiness. The authors also demonstrate that increased sustainability disclosure helps reduce information asymmetry incrementally more when both costs are sticky and CSR activities are sticky.

In this paper we develop a model for researching the influence that a board of directors can have on improving an organization’s sustainability performance. Our model explores sources of cognitive flexibility of boards needed to recognize and respond to the need for improved sustainability performance. We first define concepts of sustainability, sustainability competence, and sustainability performance. We then analyze two forms of board capital (a board’s human capital and its social capital) and three aspects of a board’s information processing (its patterns of information search, discussion and debate, and information absorption) that we suggest affect a board’s cognitive flexibility and thereby influence whether a board decides to adopt sustainability performance goals. Our model also suggests that an organization’s strategic flexibility – as represented by its current endowments of resource flexibilities and coordination flexibilities – will moderate the relationship between a board’s decision to adopt sustainability performance goals and an organization’s subsequent achievement of those goals. We also suggest that our model is generally relevant to any research seeking to predict the influence of boards on strategic change in many forms, not just to research focused on sustainability issues.

One of the children of Brundtland has been the concept of the triple bottom line – economic, environmental and social – as a means of planning for and measuring performance. This approach has largely been unquestioningly accepted. Despite this the agenda for socially responsible behaviour has evolved and developed. Now the concern is for the whole supply chain, which transcends the organisational boundary and throws a question over any idea of the triple bottom line. Corporate concern increasingly focuses upon two key issues, which are also of paramount importance to individuals: environmental degradation, particularly climate change, and human rights protection. In addition a lot of concern has been expressed as a result of revelations stemming from the economic and financial crisis, which have exposed significant failures in governance at corporate level and in markets and governments. Environmental degradation, human rights protection and governance operate at many levels from global to corporate. In many ways they parallel the idea of the triple bottom line but are not organisationally bounded. They represent issues of greater concern than merely corporate issues; they have an impact on the global and societal matters also. They are also totally connected to sustainable behaviour. In this chapter we therefore argue that this is the real triple bottom line, and discuss the implications.

Based on the 5th wave/tomorrow age theory, we are living in the world that is in necessity to change. Rapid urbanization causes global challenges such as economic problems and recessions, environmental challenges, climate change, social instability, health diseases, biological attached, and crisis caused by technological dominations. These challenges threaten the world, humanity, and human beings. Therefore, it is vital to tackle and struggle with them in order to maintain the world and improve quality of livability and quality of life to achieve sustainability. Generally, modern Blue-Green urban areas and smart cities with high quality of livability and life are proposed to deal with urbanization challenges to maintain the world and improve quality of human life. Based on Prof. Doost's 5th wave theory, related theories, concepts and models like Doost Risk Mitigation Method (DRMM), and also his experience on sustainability as best practice such as cooperating with Danish Sustainable Platforms Company, working as an academic leader at IoE/EQ EU Erasmus Plus project in Germany during 2017–2020, cooperating with former mayor of Copenhagen, consulting the German MV State Minister of Energy, Digitalization, and Infrastructure to cooperate with Iran in 2016, more than 15 years holding lecture and research internationally about risk and risk management on mobility in different universities like (TU Berlin) Technical University of Berlin (EUREF Campus, Sustainable Mobility Management and Sustainability Building) and also achieving a honorary doctorate in sustainable development management, a practical model concerned on risk management in mobility to provide comprehensive global Blue-Green clean sustainable urban mobility risk mitigation strategic plan is given. Therefore, in this chapter, impact of risk management on mobility to provide sustainable global urban mobility plan in order to create modern Blue-Green sustainable urban area and future smart cities through the 5th wave theory are explored. Fundamentally, the main goal of the research is to have an applied study about mobility risk mitigation and utilize it as a key to create comprehensive global urban mobility risk mitigation plan toward Blue-Green sustainable clean mobility technologies to create modern sustainable smart cities through the tomorrow age theory in order to create livable urban area with high quality of livability and life. In addition, the risks in mobility through the DRMM are measured to analyze the risk and to do risk mitigation and mobility project improvement to move to sustainable mobility and high sustainability in future smart cities.

The social responsibility of organisations – commonly known as corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate responsibility – has become an important issue in contemporary international debates (see Aras & Crowther, 2007a). More recently, however, the discourse has changed to that of sustainability, and many corporate reports which used to be designated as environmental reports and subsequently as CSR reports have now been repackaged as sustainability reports. CSR, however, is more problematic as it is often perceived that there is a dichotomy between CSR activity and financial performance with one being deleterious to the other and corporations having an imperative to pursue shareholder value. Moreover, there is no agreed upon definition of exactly what constitutes CSR (Ortiz Martinez & Crowther, 2005) and therefore no agreed upon basis for measuring that activity and relating it to the various dimensions of corporate performance. Consequently, much of the previous research regarding CSR deals with this issue and the problems in development of standards for definition and reporting for such indeterminate activity (see Crowther, 2006).

The logic of the economic system under which the world operates is predicated on an assumption that development is possible and that the pricing system mediates the acquisition of the additional resources required for that development. The chapter investigates where those resources are and focuses particularly on the BRIC counties. These countries have access to a large proportion of the remaining natural resources of the world while also having large populations and therefore great scope for rapid economic growth. These four countries contain a significant proportion of the world’s reserves of raw materials, but they are also rapidly developing countries with that development fuelled by their raw materials. One consequence of this is that the resources available to other countries in the developed world are constrained by this rising demand, with a number of possible consequences. The discourse in the developed world is towards the conservation of resources and towards energy efficiency. This is reflected in both manufacturing resources and consumer purchasing decisions. So it is generally accepted that resource depletion will affect the economic environment. It is not yet fully recognised, however, that development in other parts of the world will exacerbate this pressure and lead to a greater need to compete for the available resources. This competition will be economic but could also become physical as the world adjusts to a new geopolitical environment. This is an important topic not being addressed elsewhere.

Small traditional industry has been recognized as an important local economy that support cultural industry and is significant in many parts of the world, particularly in developing countries. The significance of this type industry as a poverty barrier, enables jobs for local rural villagers, and their role in continuing local community based cultural activities have become obvious. However, as the current modern days global pressures affecting many traditional people in developing countries, pathways of small traditional industry toward local sustainable development remain unclear. Further continuous investigations are still required on how this industry provide the platform for greater local, regional and global sustainability. Literatures and debates on the sustainability of the rural developing country concerning small traditional industries may even begin from the establishment of Brundtland sustainability commission in 1987. The conflict between brown and green agenda in Brundtland commission may also point to small-scale traditional industry growth in the developing world. Cultural traditional industries in developing countries could better lead to local sustainability pathway. On the other hand, conflict of the use of natural resources and competition may create different stories. How traditional industry in developing country survive and further innovate for development is a significant knowledge to understand. This chapter uses Jepara traditional furniture industry in Central Java – Indonesia which has been the subject of prolonged study on how small-scale industry implicated to global competition and pressures of raw material resources decline. This chapter further reviews previous research and recent study on Jepara industry upgrade and innovation, and how likely innovation may prosper for the future sustainability of this type of industry.

Plastic seems to be getting a universally bad press at the moment with the current opinion being that plastic is incompatible with sustainability. In this chapter the nature of plastic or sustainability and of social responsibility are examined and redefined. The conclusion is that it is not plastic which is irresponsible but rather people and business which need to change. In doing so a number of seemingly diverse topics are considered and examined to show their relevance to this argument.