Despite widespread engagement of businesses in sustainable development, concerns about the development of human life and its impact on the environment remain pressing. Current sustainability initiatives and conceptions have been criticized for failing to deliver the required changes in business practices that would lead to a more sustainable existence. Initiatives and researchers in this field tend to assume that sustainability management structures, tools, and mechanisms are contingently applied to relevant issues of concern and result in the envisaged performance. Further, although research on business sustainability is flourishing, only a few explanatory frameworks exist to date and, generally, these lack a performance orientation. This paper aims to address this void by offering an integrative approach to sustainability performance of businesses. First, we provide a comprehensive definition of sustainability performance and suggest that learning and change processes are prerequisites to achieving business sustainability. Second, we follow a suggestion by Zollo et al. (2013) in situating learning and change processes in a context of enabling and hindering factors. Third, we develop a typology with an institutional vantage point on sustainability, from which we derive four strategies for issue responsiveness, five modes of issue integration, and a set of 10 distinct learning processes. The performance implications of previous conceptualizations of impression management, shared value, and sustainable business models are explained by this framework. The framework reveals that although businesses are currently perceived as engaging in sustainable development, its integration into business operations is partial and that the conditions for further learning and change may not be given to date. Further, the framework indicates that business could be adopting the current best practices promoted by sustainability initiatives as a defensive approach, such that the initiatives are failing to stimulate the required proactive engagement. In offering a holistic theoretical approach to sustainability performance, this paper aims to stimulate scholarship to address an important but neglected field and to produce more meaningful recommendations for practitioners designing business sustainability initiatives.
Keywords: Business sustainability, sustainability performance, institutional theory, organizational learning and change
5a. Corporate sustainability and CSR
