Sustainable Management and Performance in SMEs: A French Case Study

Sandrine Berger-Douce ()
Additional contact information
Sandrine Berger-Douce: EPICE-ENSMSE - Département Etudes sur la performance, l'Innovation et le Changement en Entreprise - Mines Saint-Étienne MSE - École des Mines de Saint-Étienne - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] - Institut Henri Fayol, COACTIS - COnception de l'ACTIon en Situation - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UJM - Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne, Mines Saint-Étienne MSE - École des Mines de Saint-Étienne - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris], FAYOL-ENSMSE - Institut Henri Fayol - Mines Saint-Étienne MSE - École des Mines de Saint-Étienne - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Nowadays, sustainable management seems more likely to be a guarantee of competitiveness for companies, regardless of their size. Besides offering those strategic opportunities, sustainable management practices also play a significant role in gaining acceptance and legitimacy in the marketplace. Moreover, SMEs are continually researching ways to improve their performance. The relationship between sustainability and company performance has interested researchers for twenty years, even if the academic results are mostly focused on bigger companies. The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of how sustainable management practices help in achieving global performance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The analysis of this case study shows how the transition from risk management to sustainable management allows an improvement in global company performance. Global performance considers social, environmental and societal issues in addition to economic performance. The first part of the paper looks at the relationship between sustainability and performance in the context of SMEs. The second part uses a French case study to illustrate how an industrial SME can implement sustainable management and translate this into improved performance. To resume, this paper illustrates that sustainable management can be a catalyst for innovation in industrial SMEs.

Keywords: small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); case study; (global) performance; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal-emse.ccsd.cnrs.fr/emse-01058350v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in 2014, 16p

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal-emse.ccsd.cnrs.fr/emse-01058350v1/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:journl:emse-01058350

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().