Since the early 1990s, the world has observed a tremendous rise in initiatives that aim to align business practices with sustainability objectives. However, despite widespread adoption of best practices by businesses and... [ view full abstract ]
Since the early 1990s, the world has observed a tremendous rise in initiatives that aim to align business practices with sustainability objectives. However, despite widespread adoption of best practices by businesses and proclamations of reoriented company values, evidence of changes at their core performance levels for sustainability is scarce. Initiatives offering services designed to promote sustainability tend not to provide evaluative information on the effectiveness of their approaches, leading to obscurity regarding their actual achievements. In addition, it is unclear to what extent such initiatives can draw on prescriptive guidance regarding how to address business unsustainability. Therefore, this paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of the sustainability service industry and the current state of academic knowledge on sustainability performance of businesses. First, the emergence of the sustainability service industry is outlined, followed by a summary of the evidence regarding the effectiveness of the approaches taken to date. Then, we provide a review of the literature on businesses’ internal dimensions of sustainability performance, building on previous reviews conducted by Adams (2002), Aguinis and Glavas (2012), Delgado-Ceballos et al. (2012), Engert et al. (2016), and Thijssens et al. (2016). We outline thereby how assumptions of contingency are widespread in both business sustainability research and the service industry without being subject to scholarly inquiry. Like the sustainability service industry in practice, business sustainability scholarship implicitly accepts assumptions of contingency in research designs. For instance, researchers explain the development of sustainability strategies, the creation of management structures, and participation in voluntary initiatives, among others, but neglect to analyze their deployments and the sustainability issues supposedly being addressed. Assumptions of contingency in business sustainability research are discussed along four problems that render their adoption incomplete, inconsistent, and misleading. These problems have an effect beyond academia, as a major point raised by Margolis and Walsh (2003) is revealed to have a further and deeper problematic appearance: By accepting assumptions of contingency to sustainability performance, “organization theory and research handicaps itself in yet another way. It leaves organizations that seek to respond to these calls for [business] involvement bereft of prescriptive guidance for how to do so” (p. 282). We consider that the acknowledgement of this disconnect is a necessary step forward to reduce the imbalance in organization and management studies (Walsh et al., 2003) and to assist in developing a better understanding of how we can live with organizations in the long run (Walsh et al., 2006).
Keywords: Business sustainability, sustainability service industry, sustainability performance, contingency theory, field assumptions
5a. Corporate sustainability and CSR
