Stages of Corporate Sustainability: Integrating the Strong Sustainability Worldview

Abstract

Businesses are increasingly adopting sustainability, yet the environment continues to decline. This research responds to Dyllick and Muff’s assertion that this paradox is caused by a constricted understanding of the meaning of corporate sustainability, lack of inclusion of constructs from related streams of literature, and failure to integrate micro and macro perspectives of sustainability. The current research addresses these concerns through an integration of 22 micro- and macro-level models of stages of development from literature in corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility, environmental management, and sustainable development. This integration results in a new unified model of stages of corporate sustainability that broadens the current narrowly constricted understanding of corporate sustainability, extends the paradigm of corporate sustainability beyond the business case and into the realm of ecological science and strong sustainability, and sheds light on the paradox.

Business model based on strong sustainability: Insights from an empirical study

“…Although businesses are increasingly adopting issues of sustainability, the environment continues to decline (Landrum, ). One reason may be that businesses still operate on 19th‐century paradigms, which are only superficially updated to include the problems of sustainability (Starik, Stubbs, & Benn, ).…”

When companies improve the sustainability of the natural environment: A study of large U.S. companies

“…Yet, there is a general ‘big disconnect’ between companies' current approaches to environmental management and those required of them (Dyllick & Muff, , p.157; Landrum & Ohsowski, ; Milne & Gray, ); companies' environmental management approaches generally fall short of those required for the sustainability of the natural environment (Haffar & Searcy, ). Scholars have therefore called for a shift from currently‐practiced incremental approaches to the adoption of radical approaches to environmental management (Landrum, ) that enhance the sustainability of the natural environment. Scholars have, furthermore, suggested that self‐regulation, government regulation and civil society pressure can be used to improve sustainability management (Karnani, ).…”

Arcs of carbon awareness in the value chain and their antecedents

“…The corporate sustainability movement is facing a seeming paradox: Despite the growing infusion of environmental concerns into corporate strategy over the last decades, the degree of planetary ecological degradation continues to increase (Dyllick & Muff, ; Landrum, ). On the one hand, some firms are achieving resource productivity improvements, contributing to a partial decoupling of growth from material consumption in developed countries (Plank, Eisenmenger, Schaffartzik, & Wiedenhofer, ).…”

“…Despite the growing infusion of environmental concerns into corporate strategy over the last decades, the degree of planetary ecological degradation continues to increase (Dyllick & Muff, 2016;Landrum, 2018).…”