Organizations are under mounting pressure to adapt to and to adopt corporate sustainability (CS) practices. Notwithstanding the increasing research attention given to the subject and the meaningful theoretical contributions, it is claimed that a definition, and a commonly accepted understanding of the concept of corporate sustainability, is still missing. Alignment on the meaning of CS is of critical importance for enabling coherent and effective practices. The lack of a sound theoretical foundation and of conceptual clarity of corporate sustainability has been identified as an important cause of unsatisfactory and fruitless actions by organizations. To address the questions “What is Corporate Sustainability?” and “Is it true there is a lack of convergence and clarity of the concept?”, we perform an ontological analysis of the different and interrelated concepts, and a necessary condition analysis on the key constitutive features of corporate sustainability within the academic literature. We demonstrate that the concept of corporate sustainability is clearer than most authors claim and can be well defined around its environmental, social and economic constitutive pillars with the purpose to provide equal opportunities to future generations.

Measuring Corporate Sustainability (CS) has been identified as an important enabler for integrating sustainability into corporate practices. Different methodologies and frameworks for measuring CS have been developed in the literature with limited success, as reflected by the lack of application in the real world. Among practitioners, the effort has been on developing frameworks that provide useful indicators of the different items that need to be considered for integrating sustainability. Notwithstanding the increasing attention and progress on the subject, a cohesive and applicable measure of CS across firms, industries and geographies is still missing. This paper provides an examination of the different methodologies for measuring CS, with an analysis of their merits and limitations, as well as guidance for future research focus. The findings show a failure to coherently link the mathematical measurement and data aggregation methodologies to a well-constructed concept where the linkage between the defining features and causal relations are appropriately identified. The proposed models and mathematical techniques are not able to inform on the extent to which a corporation acts sustainably because sustainability is not being measured in its highest extension, making the results narrow, non-referential and non-comparable. Furthermore, there is confusion between developing the indicators of CS, providing their measurement and enabling their integration.