Corporate sustainable actions through United Nations sustainable development goals: The internal customer's response

Designing sustainable corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy utilizing the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) framework to deal with consumption in a sustainable and responsible fashion is increasingly a requirement in emerging economies. This paper examines sustainable social initiatives (SIs) via a CSR model and social lens as part of the SDG framework for multinational enterprises (MNEs), to determine the perception of the internal customer and stakeholder (i.e., the employee) alongside their identification and voluntary engagement in their organization's SIs. The study examines internal customers (as the employee) of two MNEs who reside in a developed country and two developing countries from emerging economies. The findings indicate that identification with the SDG‐based SIs selected by MNEs for this study mediates the relationship between perception of their organization's perceived CSR and engagement in these initiatives, for employees in developing countries (and emerging markets) but not the developed country. This suggests the importance that internal employees “identify” with SDG‐based SIs in emerging markets in particular and builds on significant managerial implications for MNEs in these markets alongside their voluntary work with nonprofits as part of their SIs and CSR strategy. The findings also confirm the importance of MNEs adopting SIs that are not only relevant to the global United Nations SDG framework but also relevant to the actors, collaborators, and nonprofit organizations involved in these SIs, including stakeholders and in particular the internal customer (i.e., employee) who volunteer their time to implement these SIs in the communities where MNEs reside.     

Pursuing sustainable development through green entrepreneurship: An institutional perspective

Pursuing sustainable development through green entrepreneurship has been advocated, conceptualized, and empirically examined in the recent environmental management and entrepreneurship literature. However, green entrepreneurs are embedded in institutional environments that may discourage them from embracing sustainable development because of the “paradox of embedded agency.” How can a firm overcome the liability of such an agency issue and escape what has become known as a “green prison”? This study proposes that, because international venturing exposes firms to foreign institutions, it provides them with opportunities for institutional learning. Thus, we examine how international venturing influences green entrepreneurship which, in turn, impacts firm performance. Specifically, based on institutional theory, this study develops a firm-level green entrepreneurship framework with three dimensions: green initiatives (a firm's active adoption of green practices), received government green support (benefits that a firm gains from the government by adapting to governmental incentives, programs, and policies related to green practices), and green political influence (a firm's attempts to influence legislation that enacts laws, rules, and regulations related to green practices). The results obtained by analyzing 152 firms that engage in international venturing activities and 151 firms that do not show that international venturing is positively associated with green initiatives and government green support while these two factors further directly enhance firm performance and mediate the effects of international venturing on performance.     

Energy eco‐innovations for sustainable development: Exploring organizational strategic capabilities through an energy cultures framework

This article reports on research on energy eco‐innovation using case studies of firms. Positioning energy efficiency changes in an organization as “eco‐innovations,” the paper examines the firm‐level resources involved for these to be successful. To identify these resources, the energy cultures (EC) framework, an organizing tool to understand energy behaviour, is drawn on. From an analysis of 142 case studies of successful business and energy change, three models are developed. It is found that the EC framework (consisting of norms, material culture, and practices) makes explicit key resources involved in developing energy eco‐innovations. The findings show that for an eco‐innovation capability, there is a need to align the physical resources with intangible resources to lead to learning and knowledge that, in turn, needs to be aligned with the firm strategies. This research has implications for developing company strategy and practice to drive energy eco‐innovations.     

工程监理可持续发展因素剖析

新世纪之初,我国将可持续发展的问题,提到了非常紧迫的位置上,近来更是要求用科学的发展观制定发展目标、发展战略以及发展措施。对于我们这样一个人口众多、资源相对匮乏,却已连续实现高增长的发展中国家而言,党中央提出用科学的发展观来统领我们的工作是非常必要的。而工程监理及时认真地思考可持续发展问题也是当务之急。所谓可持续发展是1987年由联合国环境与发展委员会在《我们共同的未来》的调     

滇池流域可持续发展投入产出分析

滇池流域的生态环境由于昆明市经济的迅速发展而面临严峻的形势,用投入产出表来分析滇池流域经济与环境的影响关系是一个行之有效的方法,只需有限的环境保护数据及简单的分离方法就可以制作一张昆明市环境保护投入产出来,为政府进行环境经济规划提供依据。     

Preserving religious identity through education: Economic analysis and evidence from the US

This paper models the decision of religious parents to send their children to private religious schools as reflecting their desire to shield their children from external influences and thus preserve their religious identity. It follows that when the share of the minority in the local population grows—and outside influences become less threatening—the demand for separate religious schooling among the members of the religious group decreases. This pattern implies concavity in the relationship between enrollment in private and religious schooling and the share of the religious group in the population. We present empirical evidence from United States county data on Catholic and private school enrollment that strongly supports our theory. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the demand for religious education.     

The role of environmental innovation through the technological proximity in the implementation of the sustainable development

This paper explores the relationship between a firm's knowledge sourcing strategy and green innovation. The data are taken from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development REGPAT database, February 2016, relative to the European Patent Office firms' patent applications published up to December 2015. The study contributes to the literature by focusing on the moderating role of integration between different activities related to environmental performance on the relationship between knowledge sources and green innovations. The results from 240 firms indicate a shift in the focus from internal knowledge to external knowledge when developing environmental innovations. Government policies promoting more knowledge complementarity and coordination between environmental fields will help to promote more knowledge transfer, allowing more sustainable development.     

Connecting strategic orientation,innovation strategy,and corporate sustainability: A model for sustainable development through stakeholder engagement

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of the relationship between organizations' strategic orientation (i.e., instrumental, equidistant, and stewardship) and their innovational strategy (i.e., organizational ambidexterity and open innovation), and this relationship's influence on their sustainability performance. We expected organizations' strategic orientation to influence their innovational strategy and exhibit better corporate sustainability. We focused on 12 different multinational organizations in the Eurozone and found that inbound open innovation acts as a driver for corporate sustainability while simultaneously positively enabling organizations to pursue both financial and social initiatives. After suggesting open innovation as a new corporate sustainability antecedent, we only found empirical evidence of inbound open innovation. However, we would suggest that if organizations incorporated outbound open innovation in their strategy, they could likely improve their corporate sustainability. Also, we found that achieving an equidistant or stewardship orientation paves the way for sustainability to become an integral part of an organization's innovational culture and actualizes the organization's strategic behavior. Our findings further contribute to a deeper understanding of organizations' characteristics as their sustainability commitment grows and as they move from an instrumental to a stewardship orientation and implement an open innovational strategy.     

城市化可持续均衡发展的经济学分析

我国在城市化热潮中,出现了城市房地产"过热"等问题,如何保持城市化进程处于可持续的均衡发展状态,是实现现代化的一个大问题.文章从经济学角度分析了城市化可持续发展的均衡状态,并提出实现这一状态的调节政策.     

The management of sustainable development: A longitudinal analysis of the effects of environmental performance on economic performance

The literature on sustainable development has largely focused on investigating the relationship between companies' environmental and economic performance. However, many aspects remain unexplored, and empirical studies are far from reaching a consensus due to the heterogeneity of the environmental and economic measures and methodologies used. This study contributes to the literature on sustainable development by considering a panel of 998 US companies observed over the period 2003–2017 using both traditional panel data methods and an unconditional quantile regression technique. The empirical evidence confirms that environmental performance, measured in terms of environmental orientation and environmental innovation, positively affects returns on assets and equity. It also demonstrates that these returns change across quantiles and depend on the capacity of green companies to generate the same streams of income as nongreen companies but with less capital. In other words, green firms tend to be more efficient in generating future wealth.     

Human capital and sustainable competitive advantage: an analysis of the relationship between training and performance

This article analyses the importance of training as a creator of human capital, which enables a company to obtain competitive advantages that are sustainable in the long-term that result in greater profitability. The study is based on the general theoretical framework of resource and capacity theory. The study not only analyses the impact of the influence of training on performance; it also attempts to analyse the nature of such a relationship in greater depth. This being the case, an attempt has been made to measure explanatory capacity from two different perspectives: the universalistic approach and the contingent approach. At the outset, two hypotheses are formulated that attempt to quantify the relationship from a universalistic perspective to later, in two more hypotheses, incorporate the potential moderating effect of the strategy into the model, in order to verify whether or not this strategy improves the explanatory power of our model of analysis.

Business conceptions of sustainable development: a perspective from critical theory

The discourse of sustainable development reflects the particular interests and ‘stakes in the ground’ of groups, including corporates, who contest the definition of the concept. Perspectives from critical theory, supplemented by Foucauldian concepts, expose the role of power and hegemony in that contestation. Applied to understandings of sustainable development held by corporate managers, they reveal conceptions largely based in eco‐modernism and ‘political sustainability’. The preliminary outcomes of research in progress that is taking a dialectical approach to the examination of the discourse of sustainable development in New Zealand companies are discussed. A case is made for maintaining greater discursivity in corporations and the broader setting, since, in a Foucauldian sense, it is the discourse that is producing sustainable development. It is argued that the predominating ‘green business’ discourse engages only superficially with sustainable development, and that what is now needed is a discourse of business and sustainable development framed in critical theory. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment     

Sector variation and ecological modernization: towards an analysis at the level of the firm

This paper is the first of a series of two in which the authors consider ecological modernization of state environmental policy in the context of individual firms. This is explored through three themes: the influences of industrial sector, company size and type of environmental regulation. In this paper, the significance of industry sector is explored and the authors show how lead and laggard sectors react in quite different ways. In the second paper (Vol. 7 No. 5), the theme of variability to the challenge of ecological modernization through the study of the impact of firm size and response to regulation is pursued. Throughout, the authors emphasize the need to understand the context in which firms operate and perceive their environment if we are to make progress in our knowledge and refine appropriate policies, tools and mechanisms to help steer industry on a more sustainable path. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The co-creation of value for pursuing a sustainable happiness: The analysis of an Italian prison community

Happiness is generally considered a timeless and an ultimate goal for human being, groups, and even nations. Even though the personal dimension of happiness has been widely investigated, the literature still calls for further research on how individual, community and/or global happiness can be enhanced and sustained in the long run without exploiting future generations possibility to be happy. Thus, this study aims at contributing to bridge this gap, embracing value co-creation and its circular logic as a guiding framework of analysis. To this end, the existing relationship between happiness, co-creation and sustainable development has been explored according to the Public Service Logic (PSL), a theoretical framework based on the well-established construct of value co-creation. To support the theoretical investigation, an extreme case study has been analysed, underlining the way a specific Italian prison community approaches individual and collective happiness, both currently and in the future. The results paved the way for some interesting managerial and policy implications that might stimulate policymakers in carrying out sustainable actions and programs open to the participation and the active contribution of citizens. In this sense, the present study represents one of the first attempts to approach happiness as one of the determinants of sustainable development.     

Towards a typology of business process management professionals: identifying patterns of competences through latent semantic analysis

While researchers have analysed the organisational competences that are required for successful Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives, individual BPM competences have not yet been studied in detail. In this study, latent semantic analysis is used to examine a collection of 1507 BPM-related job advertisements in order to develop a typology of BPM professionals. This empirical analysis reveals distinct ideal types and profiles of BPM professionals on several levels of abstraction. A closer look at these ideal types and profiles confirms that BPM is a boundary-spanning field that requires interdisciplinary sets of competence that range from technical competences to business and systems competences. Based on the study’s findings, it is posited that individual and organisational alignment with the identified ideal types and profiles is likely to result in high employability and organisational BPM success.     

城市胁迫发展理论--城市可持续发展的生态学视角

将生态学的胁迫概念引入到城市的可持续发展领域中,探讨了城市的供应系统、生产系统、消费系统在面临资源、能源以及环境不足时产生的胁迫调整规律.同时对胁迫调整的作用力进行了分析,并进一步提出了城市胁迫发展的概念,对其核心问题进行了细致的阐述,从而为解决城市的可持续发展提供了一条行之有效的发展模式.     

Identifying business opportunities for sustainable development: Longitudinal and experimental evidence contributing to the field of sustainable entrepreneurship

Which factors facilitate the identification of business opportunities for sustainable development? To answer this question, we develop a process model of sustainable opportunity identification. We argue that sustainable opportunity identification is a process with transitions from problem to solution identification and from solution to sustainable opportunity identification. Moreover, the transitions are facilitated by two factors—awareness of adverse consequences and entrepreneurial attitude—providing motivation and direction in the process. We tested our model in a field study (N = 107) and two experiments (N = 53 and N = 69). Our findings show that awareness of adverse consequences and entrepreneurial attitude influence the process of sustainable opportunity identification, explaining under which conditions people are more likely to identify business opportunities for sustainable development. Our study thus contributes to the field of sustainable entrepreneurship.     

A new business model for sustainable development: an exploratory study using the theory of constraints in Nordic organizations

The business model in use by many large companies has changed significantly from that of a decade ago and has incorporated environmental and social aspects of performance. However, given these achievements, are there unavoidable inhibitions in the contemporary business model that mean that even exemplar corporations cannot become sustainable? A key issue is consumption without limits, but can businesses do anything about this? The UK Government's Sustainable Development Commission identifies this as an issue. There is a need for an open‐minded consideration of business fundamentals to consider this issue as part of an identification of criteria for a sustainable business model. This is an account of an exploratory study undertaken to identify a new business model for sustainable development. The theory of constraints was adapted to provide the project's methodology that made use of semi‐structured interviews and secondary material. The cloverleaf account of sustainable development was used to structure and analyse sustainable development information. The organizations studied are all located in Nordic countries, since these countries are globally recognized for sustainable development achievements. Conclusions of the study acknowledge that, whilst specific new management tools and approaches of Nordic organizations do help sustainable development, it is the social context in which these organizations function that is a critical factor. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Leadership strategies for sustainable development: a case study of Suma Wholefoods

This paper explores possible leadership strategies for a firm wishing to move towards sustainable development, defined in its most holistic, long term, environmental, social and financial sense. Empirical, grounded theory, case study findings from Suma Wholefoods, a socially innovative U.K. worker co‐operative, are used to explore the above research aim. A case study of such a company could prove illuminating considering the importance placed by numerous authors on the links between worker participation, pluralism and sustainable development. The central objective of the paper is to consider to what extent Suma can maintain its pluralist commitment and practically move towards sustainable development, using a contextually appropriate leadership strategy. Realising that sustainable development may be more of a journey than a destination, Suma's past, present and possible future leadership strategies are explored. The case study findings argue against using solely participative or wider pluralist leadership strategies. Alternatively, the findings argue that a business should adopt a contextually appropriate set of leadership styles, based on different contingency theories. For Suma, a possible future leadership strategy would be predominantly pluralist, in order to take account of its enduring pluralist commitment. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment