Toward an Organizational Theory of Sustainability Vision

Sooksan Kantabutra
Additional contact information
Sooksan Kantabutra: Center for Research on Sustainable Leadership and ASEAN Centre for Sustainable Development Studies and Dialogue, College of Management, Mahidol University, Bangkok 10400, Thailand

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-26

Abstract: While vision is considered as the starting point for any transformation process toward sustainability, little is known about how such a vision looks. To fill in a fundamental gap in the corporate sustainability literature, the present study advances a theory of organizational vision into a coherent theory of sustainability vision. It adopts the theory-building approaches of covering-law, enlightenment, and process by comparing and contrasting a diverse set of relevant plausible, logical, empirical, and/or epistemological conjectures so that highlighting occurs to form the substance of the refined theory. The resulting theory of sustainability vision asserts that effective sustainability visions are characterized by the seven attributes of brevity, clarity, future orientation, stability, challenge, abstractness, desirability or ability to inspire and one imagery of stakeholder satisfaction. Relevant propositions and a model are introduced for future research, followed by practical implications.

Keywords: corporate sustainability; sustainability theory; sustainability; vision; sustainable business; organizational culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/3/1125/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/3/1125/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:3:p:1125-:d:316723

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().