Guest editorial

Abstract

Guest editorial IntroductionThis editorial presents an introduction to the special issue on the "Linkages and Complementarities between Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability -Challenges for Science and Practice." This special issue originated at the fifth Symposium on Ethics and Social Responsibility Research 2019. The aim is to bring together a collection of original research papers that cover these three topics, promoting whenever possible a dialog to explore linkages and complementarities between them.Research related to topics of ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability has gained increasing attention from both scholars and practitioners (Aguinis and Glavas, 2012;Carroll and Shabana, 2010;Treviño and Nelson, 2017) and motivated multiple special issues in various mainstream and specialist journals (Kudłak and Low, 2015). In practice, there is also an increasing expectation that organizations should be accountable for ensuring ethical internal and external processes, for the way they manage their relationship with the stakeholders, asking for a higher level of transparency in decision processes affecting society at large (Burchell and Cook, 2006;Carroll and Shabana, 2010;Treviño et al., 2014;Welsh et al., 2015). The same is true for environmental and social sustainability problems, which are increasingly important topics in public debates and concerns among individuals and communities (Murray et al., 2010;Stubblefield Loucks et al., 2010). Media pressure, for instance, may influence company disclosure in sectors such as fashion that is often under the spotlight (Auke and Simaens, 2019).Although the constructs of CSR and corporate sustainability have emerged from different streams in the literature, there are conceptual similarities and differences among them. Some argue that CSR is grounded in ethics and normative arguments, whereas corporate sustainability originated in a systems approach (Bansal and Song, 2017). In addition, although scholars in the 1970s focused mostly on CSR as opposed to the economic realities of profit maximization, in more recent decades, attention has also been devoted to corporate sustainability, often with a focus on its environmental dimension. Still, although CSR and corporate sustainability are clearly distinct constructs (Bansal and Song, 2017), the literature reveals a growing trend toward a more integrated approach to both topics that incorporates social, environmental and economic concerns into the equation. This trend seems quite compelling because, as Montiel (2008, p. 260) argues, "contemporary businesses must address economic prosperity, social equity, and environmental integrity before they can lay claim to socially responsible behaviour or sustainable practices." Hence, despite the separate pasts (Bansal and Song, 2017;Montiel, 2008), the constructs of CSR and corporate sustainability could share a common future (Montiel, 2008), and organizational ethics may well be the "magnetic force" behind this rapprochement.For instance, ...