Clarifying the Concept of Corporate Sustainability and Providing Convergence for Its Definition

Mariapia Pazienza, Martin de Jong and Dirk Schoenmaker
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Mariapia Pazienza: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Martin de Jong: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 13, 1-21

Abstract: Organizations are under mounting pressure to adapt to and to adopt corporate sustainability (CS) practices. Notwithstanding the increasing research attention given to the subject and the meaningful theoretical contributions, it is claimed that a definition, and a commonly accepted understanding of the concept of corporate sustainability, is still missing. Alignment on the meaning of CS is of critical importance for enabling coherent and effective practices. The lack of a sound theoretical foundation and of conceptual clarity of corporate sustainability has been identified as an important cause of unsatisfactory and fruitless actions by organizations. To address the questions “What is Corporate Sustainability?” and “Is it true there is a lack of convergence and clarity of the concept?”, we perform an ontological analysis of the different and interrelated concepts, and a necessary condition analysis on the key constitutive features of corporate sustainability within the academic literature. We demonstrate that the concept of corporate sustainability is clearer than most authors claim and can be well defined around its environmental, social and economic constitutive pillars with the purpose to provide equal opportunities to future generations.

Keywords: corporate sustainability; concept of corporate sustainability; definition of corporate sustainability; sustainable development; CSR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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