Tensions in Corporate Sustainability: Towards an Integrative Framework
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In this article, the authors propose a systematic framework for the analysis of tensions in corporate sustainability, which is based on the emerging integrative view on corporate sustainability and stresses the need for a simultaneous integration of economic, environmental and social dimensions without, a priori, emphasising one over any other.Abstract:
This paper proposes a systematic framework for the analysis of tensions in corporate sustainability. The framework is based on the emerging integrative view on corporate sustainability, which stresses the need for a simultaneous integration of economic, environmental and social dimensions without, a priori, emphasising one over any other. The integrative view presupposes that firms need to accept tensions in corporate sustainability and pursue different sustainability aspects simultaneously even if they seem to contradict each other. The framework proposed in this paper goes beyond the traditional triad of economic, environmental and social dimensions and argues that tensions in corporate sustainability occur between different levels, in change processes and within a temporal and spatial context. The framework provides vital groundwork for managing tensions in corporate sustainability based on paradox strategies. The paper then applies the framework to identify and characterise four selected tensions and illustrates how key approaches from the literature on strategic contradictions, tensions and paradoxes—i.e., acceptance and resolution strategies—can be used to manage these tensions. Thereby, it refines the emerging literature on the integrative view for the management of tensions in corporate sustainability. The framework also provides managers with a better understanding of tensions in corporate sustainability and enables them to embrace these tensions in their decision making.read more
Citations
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The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)
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Cognitive Frames in Corporate Sustainability: Managerial Sensemaking with Paradoxical and Business Case Frames
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References
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Book ChapterDOI
The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness
TL;DR: In this article, the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society, is examined, and it is argued that reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the "oversocialized" way criticized by Dennis Wrong.
Journal ArticleDOI
Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems
TL;DR: The traditional view of natural systems, therefore, might well be less a meaningful reality than a perceptual convenience.