中国走向强可持续性发展的战略选择

本文认为,近二十年来世界上许多国家发展的可持续性问题引起了很大争议,主要原因在于选择了弱可持续性和强可持续性两种不同范式作为测评标准.这两种范式争论的焦点在于判断自然资本与人造资本的替代性问题以及至关重要的自然资本度量问题的方式和标准.领先发展模式和U型发展模式证明,强可持续性是一国应该采用的标准,这两种模式也为中国的可持续发展之路提供了借鉴.文章提出,我国要实现强可持续发展目标,需要发展循环经济,提高生态效率,实行生态补偿机制,大力发展环保产业.     

The Innovation Process and the Development of a Sustainability Strategy

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes what influences a firm's choice of strategy—why some firms stick to defensive strategies while others rely on offensive ones. With this in mind a survey was conducted on mineral sector companies associated with the Brazilian Mining Institute. The results show that the majority of companies use an offensive strategy and that some companies use more than one strategy at the same time. That is, they possess a corporate strategy and a sustainability strategy.     

可持续发展报告:可持续发展的催化剂

可持续发展报告,是指一个组织向公众披露它的经济、环境和社会业绩,正在迅速成为世界上的领袖企业和组织的标准实践,它有利于企业和组织提高内部管理和改善外部关系。全球报告倡议组织(GRI)可持续发展报告指南越     

Sustainability, Epistemology, Ecocentric Business, and Marketing Strategy: Ideology, Reality, and Vision

This conceptual article examines the relationship between marketing and sustainability through the dual lenses of anthropocentric and ecocentric epistemology. Using the current anthropocentric epistemology and its associated dominant social paradigm, corporate ecological sustainability in commercial practice and business school research and teaching is difficult to achieve. However, adopting an ecocentric epistemology enables the development of an alternative business and marketing approach that places equal importance on nature, the planet, and ecological sustainability as the source of human and other species’ well-being, as well as the source of all products and services. This article examines ecocentric, transformational business, and marketing strategies epistemologically, conceptually and practically and thereby proposes six ecocentric, transformational, strategic marketing universal premises as part of a vision of and solution to current global un-sustainability. Finally, this article outlines several opportunities for management practice and further research.     

Leadership for Sustainability: An Evolution of Leadership Ability

This article examines the existing confusion over the multiple leadership styles related to successful implementation of corporate social responsibility/sustainability in organisations. The researchers find that the problem is the complex nature of sustainability itself. We posit that organisations are complex adaptive systems operating within wider complex adaptive systems, making the problem of interpreting just in what way an organisation is to be sustainable, an extraordinary demand on leaders. Hence, leadership for sustainability requires leaders of extraordinary abilities. These are leaders who can read and predict through complexity, think through complex problems, engage groups in dynamic adaptive organisational change and have the emotional intelligence to adaptively engage with their own emotions associated with complex problem solving. Leaders and leadership is a key interpreter of how sustainability of the organisation ‘links’ to the wider systems in which the organisation sits, and executing that link well requires unusual leaders and leadership systems.     

Keeping Ethical Investment Ethical: Regulatory Issues for Investing for Sustainability

Regulation must target the financial sector, which often funds and profits from environmentally unsustainable development. In an era of global financial markets, the financial sector has a crucial impact on the state of the environment. The long-standing movement for ethically and socially responsible investment (SRI) has recently begun to advocate environmental standards for financiers. While this movement is gaining more adherents, it has increasingly justified responsible financing as a path to be prosperous, rather than virtuous. This trend partly owes to how financial institutions view their legal responsibilities. The business case motivations that now predominantly drive SRI are not sufficient to make the financial sector a means to sustainable development. Some modest legal reforms to improve the quality and extent of SRI have yet to make a tangible difference. A more ambitious strategy to promote SRI for environmental sustainability is possible, based on reforming the fiduciary duties of financial institutions. Such duties, tied to concrete performance standards, could make financiers invest in more ethically responsible ways. Other collateral reforms to financial markets, including improved corporate environmental reporting, are required to promote sustainability.     

首席可持续发展官：当代企业发展之需

现在,越来越多的中国企业已开始注重企业社会责任工作,意识到将其融入日常运营当中的好处及重要性,但是许多企业还需要进一步整合履责实践,并采取更为策略性的计划。为了突破该问题,     

Assurance Services for Sustainability Reports: Standards and Empirical Evidence

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the topic of assurance services for sustainability reports. We first synthetically illustrate the main international standards for the implementation of assurance services regarding the subject documents. The second part of our article is an empirical analysis of reports drawn up on the basis of the current Global Reporting Initiative 2006 guidelines, and looks at how effectively these standards have been implemented, analyzing the different typologies of assurance statement.     

Tax System Sustainability Evaluation: A Model for EU Countries

Intereconomics - We follow the multi-dimensional approach to socio-economic sustainability and distinguish among the needs of society in the four dimensions that make up the basic pillars in our...     

The Governance of Corporate Sustainability: Empirical Insights into the Development,Leadership and Implementation of Responsible Business Strategy

This article explores how corporate governance processes and structures are being used in large Australian companies to develop, lead and implement corporate responsibility strategies. It presents an empirical analysis of the governance of sustainability in fifty large listed companies based on each company’s disclosures in annual and sustainability reports. We find that significant progress is being made by large listed Australian companies towards integrating sustainability into core business operations. There is evidence of leadership structures being put in place to ensure that board and senior management are involved in sustainability strategy development and are then incentivised to monitor and ensure implementation of that strategy through financial rewards. There is evidence of a willingness to engage and communicate clearly the results of these strategies to interested stakeholders. Overall, there appears to be a developing acceptance amongst large corporations that efforts towards improved corporate sustainability are not only expected but are of value to the business. We suggest that this is evidence of a managerial shift away from an orthodox shareholder primacy understanding of the corporation towards a more enlightened shareholder value approach, often encompassing a stakeholder-orientated view of business strategy. However, strong underlying tensions remain due to the insistent market emphasis on shareholder value.     

Preparing Students to Work for Sustainability

Preparing students to contribute to the development of a sustainable economy is proposed as the fundamental goal of business- environment courses. This requires attention to the principles of sustainable development, organizational responsibility, and personal responsibility. Development of associated knowledge, attitudes and skills will enable students to contribute to sustainable development by successfully engaging in environmental problem recognition and problem analysis, developing proposals for improving organizations' environmental performance, and participating in efforts to implement such proposals. Specific concepts consistent with these goals are identified, involving students in projects in which they attempt to affect the environmental performance of an organization, and one such assignment is described.     

一种新的服务开发理念:可持续服务创新

随着环保和可持续发展的观念日益深入人心,环保意识和环保消费创造了新的市场需求,不仅在制造业领域,而且在服务业领域都应当重视和实践可持续发展式的经营管理。将可持续发展的思想用于服务创新理论的理念,对实施可持续服务创新具有重要意义。归纳总结可持续服务创新的主要途径,旨在引起服务业对可持续发展思想的足够重视,为实施可持续服务创新提供一定的参考。     

Industry Specific Sustainability Benchmarks: An ECSF Pilot Bridging Corporate Sustainability with Social Responsible Investments

This paper investigates the state of the art with respect to sustainability reporting, its linkages with the corporations, internal measurement and monitoring systems and their combined impact on the quality of contemporary sustainability benchmarks, developed by SRI analysts and so-called rating and screening agencies. This research originated from the EU-funded research initiative to create a new generation management framework for corporate sustainability and responsibility (CS-R). The aim of it is to develop a coherent set of assessment –, measurement – and monitoring tools. The sustainability benchmark tool should align the interests of corporations implementing CS-R and various organizations supporting SRI, such as fund managers, analysts and screening agencies. This paper show the essentials features of an actual sustainability benchmark which is currently under construction. This approach will have significance impact on the further development of SRI and CS-R practices, as well as support the development of sustainability reporting standards.     

The Stakeholder Approach: A Sustainability Perspective

This article considers the stakeholder approach (SHA) to organisational management through the lens of what it means for humans to live sustainably on the Earth (that is, for there to be a sustainable world). In particular, the article considers if the SHA, as it is presented in mainstream academic and management literature, is supportive of corporate practices that advance the achievement of a sustainable world. The analysis shows the SHA to have significant failings in this regard when viewed against key sustainable world criteria, with issues of concern evident from the normative core of the SHA through to is practical application in the management setting.     

Risk Management as a Tool for Sustainability

Although risk and uncertainty are inevitable aspects of the sustainability problem, they are often neglected in the sustainability discourse, especially in the economic analysis of sustainable development. We argue that this deprives the sustainability discourse of interesting connections to risk management. We show that defining sustainability as the obligation to limit the risk of harming future individuals provides a framework in which tools from risk management, like mean-variance analysis, can be employed to analyze planning decisions and to calculate a risk-minimizing policy mix. Furthermore, we discuss whether such a notion of sustainability can be an ethically tenable sustainability concept and how a positive probability of harming future individuals might be defended.     

The Value Relevance of Reputation for Sustainability Leadership

This study investigates whether the market valuation of the two summary accounting measures, book value of equity and net income, is higher for firms with reputation for sustainability leadership, when compared to firms that do not enjoy such reputation. The results are interpreted through the lens of a framework combining signalling theory and resource-based theory, according to which firms signal their commitment to sustainability to influence the external perception of reputation. A firm’s reputation for being committed to sustainability is an intangible resource that can increase the value of a firm’s expected cash flows and/or reduce the variability of its cash flows. Our findings are according to expectations and show that the net income of firms with good sustainability reputation has a higher valuation by the market, when compared to their counterparts.     

The Question of Sustainability for Microfinance Institutions*

Microentrepreneurs have considerable difficulty accessing capital from mainstream financial institutions. One key reason is that the costs of information about the characteristics and risk levels of borrowers are high. Relationship‐based financing has been promoted as a potential solution to information asymmetry problems in the distribution of credit to small businesses. In this paper, we seek to better understand the implications for providers of “microfinance” in pursuing such a strategy. We discuss relationship‐based financing as practiced by microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the United States, analyze their lending process, and present a model for determining the break‐even price of a microcredit product. Comparing the model’s results with actual prices offered by existing institutions reveals that credit is generally being offered at a range of subsidized rates to microentrepreneurs. This means that MFIs have to raise additional resources from grants or other funds each year to sustain their operations as few are able to survive on the income generated from their lending and related operations. Such subsidization of credit has implications for the long‐term sustainability of institutions serving this market and can help explain why mainstream financial institutions have not directly funded microenterprises. We conclude with a discussion of the role of nonprofit organizations in small business credit markets, the impact of pricing on their potential sustainability and self‐sufficiency, and the implications for strategies to better structure the credit market for microbusinesses.