In Search of Sustainable Value: A Structured Literature Review

Andrea Cardoni, Evgeniia Kiseleva and Paolo Taticchi
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Andrea Cardoni: Department of Economics, University of Perugia, Via Alessandro Pascoli, 20, 06123 Perugia, Italy
Evgeniia Kiseleva: Department of Economics, University of Perugia, Via Alessandro Pascoli, 20, 06123 Perugia, Italy
Paolo Taticchi: Business Schools, Imperial College London, 457 ACE Extension, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: The concept of value, where shareholders are the main recipients of the created value, is changing towards more comprehensive models, which respond to the increased stakeholder awareness and urgent sustainability agenda. Hart and Milstein (2003) elaborated the widely used sustainable value concept in which they characterize temporal and spatial dimensions of value, and suggest strategic drivers for sustainability. Although the framework is highly cited, there is no review on the changes over more than ten years. In this paper, we adopted a structured literature review methodology to discover how the concept of sustainable value has been used by researchers and how it has been developed. Our findings show that sustainable value has mainly been used as the general phrase to describe positive business results instead of using it as a concept. Scholars, who make an in-depth analysis of sustainable value do not emphasize the time horizon of sustainable value as its peculiar characteristic while broad stakeholder surrounding is called to be an important feature of sustainable value. Additionally, strategic drivers for sustainability have moved from being purely environmental as in Hart and Milstein’s (2003) concept: globalization, economic fluctuations, and knowledge innovation have become as important as green technologies and carbon-reduction policies.

Keywords: sustainable value; sustainability; environment; CSR; stakeholders; structured literature review (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 (10)

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