Sustainability Mindsets for Strategic Management: Lifting the Yoke of the Neo-Classical Economic Perspective

Gerard Farias, Christine Farias, Isabella Krysa and Joel Harmon
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Gerard Farias: Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Silberman College of Business, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA
Christine Farias: Department of Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY 10007, USA
Isabella Krysa: Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Silberman College of Business, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vancouver, BC V6B 2P6, Canada
Joel Harmon: Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Silberman College of Business, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 17, 1-14

Abstract: While sustainability has attracted the attention of managers and academicians for over two decades, the macro-level indicators of sustainability are not moving in the right direction. Climate change continues to be an existential threat for humanity and other indicators of sustainability do not fare much better. The logic of the business case and the associated framing of tension between financial outcomes and sustainability have generated a limited and inadequate response to the existential challenges before humanity today. In this essay, we analyze the evolution of sustainability in the business context and call for a recognition that social and environmental outcomes must supersede economic ones in corporate sustainability thinking. We call for a widening of the spatial, temporal, and moral lenses in the formulation and execution of business strategy to ensure that it is in alignment with the needs of current and future generations of humanity and proportionate to planetary conditions.

Keywords: sustainability strategy; strategic mindsets; tensions in sustainability; business in society; weak and strong sustainability (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 (4)

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