Making Sustainability Tangible: Land O'Lakes and the Dairy Supply Chain

Michael Boland, Brendan Cooper and James M. White

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2016, vol. 98, issue 2, 648-657

Abstract: This case study examines the challenges of implementing a vaguely defined concept called sustainability in a large organization that also has a cooperative structure. Stakeholder theory is described and applied to a multinational dairy firm. The case firm, Land O'Lakes, must balance the needs of multiple constituencies: the general public, employees, cooperative members, external funding organizations, and the management team. One challenge is to define sustainability for the entire dairy industry. The case discusses the strategies used by firms in developing a sustainability response where the tradeoffs between different strategies are between credibility and autonomy and using an industry rather than a firm-level response.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aav062 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Making Sustainability Tangible: Land O’Lakes and the Dairy Supply Chain (2015)
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:oup:ajagec:v:98:y:2016:i:2:p:648-657.

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press (joanna.bergh@oup.com).