This study examines how supervisor bottom-line mentality (SBLM) shapes the ethical climate needed for environmental responsibility in logistics firms. Drawing on ethical climate theory (ECT) and self-determination theory (SDT), it argues that performance-focused supervisory signals weaken the moral conditions through which employees uphold environmental and compliance duties. Using time-lagged survey data from 379 employees in Pakistan’s logistics sector and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), results show that SBLM weakens workplace ethical climate directly and indirectly through moral disengagement. Job autonomy buffers these effects by reducing employees’ tendency to justify questionable operational choices under pressure. The findings reposition ethical climate as a workplace foundation for managing organizations’ environmental impact, showing that sustainability implementation depends not only on policies and reporting systems but also on moral regulation and autonomy in daily operations.
Existing models for circular economy are typically designed for firms, often overlooking alternative governance structures, traditional knowledge, and collective decision-making that shape community-based organizations. Yet these organizations are key to conserving fragile ecosystems and supporting sustainable production, as their products and raw materials integrate into industrial value chains. This article examines how community-based organizations develop dynamic capabilities to engage in circular economy initiatives through a multiple case study of two regions in the Brazilian Amazon. The findings reveal that sensing is often grounded in collective, traditional, and place-based knowledge; seizing is driven by community needs and experimentation with external knowledge; and reconfiguring occurs through collective governance arrangements, internalizing circular economy practices and maintaining autonomy. This article extends the literature beyond firm contexts by showing how circular economy capabilities can emerge through polycentric and collaborative governance and have strong ecological embeddedness, making their capabilities less dependent on firm-based structures and knowledge.
This viewpoint develops the concept of carbon subsumption – the process through which sustainability governance privileges carbon as the dominant representation of environmental performance, rendering biodiversity visible only when it can be accommodated within carbon-based forms of evaluation. We argue that carbon dominates because it provides a universal, fungible unit which enables comparison, aggregation, and trading across firms and contexts, whereas biodiversity remains context-specific, non-fungible, and difficult to translate into comparable units. We identify three mechanisms through which carbon subsumption operates: assimilation, where biodiversity is reduced to carbon value; subordination, where biodiversity is marginalised within aggregated Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics; and exclusion, where biodiversity falls outside carbon accounting boundaries. This produces a governance paradox: environmental performance becomes comparable and auditable by suppressing ecological complexity. We conclude that sustainability governance should focus less on integrating biodiversity into carbon-centred systems and more on making carbon-biodiversity trade-offs visible.
Despite widespread sustainability commitments, many firms struggle to translate intention into action. This persistent intention–action gap suggests limitations in prevailing accounts of how sustainability is integrated into strategic management that tend to emphasize top-down structures, formal systems and senior leadership. We draw on insider change agency and micro-foundations research to examine how individuals across organizational levels contribute to sustainability integration. Based on a comparative study of three multinational firms, we develop a maturity-contingent model of sustainability integration. We identify a set of top-down and bottom-up micro-strategies that individuals enact, and four mechanisms through which these micro-strategies achieve integration: finding common ground, spatial-temporal ringfencing, establishing sense of ownership and enabling self-efficacy. We show that sustainability integration emerges from shifting configurations of micro-strategies shaped by maturity-dependent opportunity structures. By theorizing how individual actions combine to embed sustainability into organizations, we advance research on corporate sustainability, its micro-foundations, and insider change agency.
Third-party sustainability measures, such as ESG scores and rankings, are central to research linking corporate sustainability and financial performance. However, these measures lack transparency and vary significantly across providers, raising reliability concerns. This systematic review of 82 business journal articles (1995-2024) assesses how scholars engage with and critically assess these measures. We distinguish two sources of uncertainty that limit confidence in these measures: the quality of underlying data (accuracy, reliability, timeliness) and how data is combined (fungibility assumptions and weighting schemes). Our analysis reveals that discussions of measurement quality are rare, while methodological rigor is bimodal—researchers either scrutinize multiple dimensions or none at all. We observe systematic associations between attention to measurement elements, data-provider choices, and reported financial performance. We argue that choices about measure quality and aggregation are not neutral, but directly shape empirical findings and their interpretation. We outline practical recommendations to advance rigor and transparency in sustainability-performance research.
Climate impacts like heatwaves, droughts, and extreme storms increasingly force organizations to adapt. Many adaptation strategies are unsustainable: actions that protect firms today can deplete ecological resources, create new vulnerabilities, or shift risks onto other communities and future generations. We argue that adaptation becomes sustainable only when understood not as reactive adjustment but as organizational and institutional transformation within planetary limits. We identify a theoretical blind spot in management research, which has focused mainly on mitigation while overlooking the unique challenges adaptation poses to organizations. Drawing on examples from the wine industry, we illustrate how maladaptive practices emerge and why adaptation raises distinctive organizational challenges. We outline a research agenda to advance sustainable adaptation by avoiding maladaptation, balancing short- and long-term horizons, and navigating firm- and collective-level decision-making. This agenda centers on adaptation’s unique ecological embeddedness, deep uncertainty, and how its risks and responsibilities are temporally and spatially distributed.
Although awareness of sustainability’s impact on performance and survival is increasing, organizations face challenges integrating sustainability into their business models. This study examines sustainability pressures in the banking sector and their influence on banking business models. Using a multiple-case study of Danish banks, the research employs boundary work to investigate whether banks preserve, adjust, or transform their models in response to these pressures. Findings reveal three key challenges to banks’ sustainability work: regulatory compliance, changing customer relationships, and gaps in internal competencies and resources. These challenges leave banks primarily engaged in boundary work for preservation or adjustment, making incremental rather than transformative changes to their business models. This study contributes to boundary work literature with a nuanced typology of boundary work dynamics. Moreover, it contributes to the sustainable business model literature and to the discussion of sustainability mainstreaming by examining how sustainability pressures either hinder or drive change in banking business models toward mainstreaming sustainability.
As sustainability reporting has become mainstream, questions remain about whether disclosed stakeholder engagement supports more democratic forms of corporate accountability. This study examines the extent to which stakeholder engagement disclosures in sustainability reports reflect practices associated with stakeholder democracy and how these disclosures have evolved over time. Using a qualitative content analysis of sustainability reports from 50 mining and energy companies, comparing 2015 and 2022 disclosures, we find that engagement remains predominantly indirect, uneven across stakeholder groups, limited in its inclusion of marginalized groups, and weakly specified. While some companies broadened and diversified their disclosures, others stagnated or regressed. The study contributes to sustainability reporting research by showing that breadth, depth, and uptake are complementary dimensions for assessing disclosed stakeholder engagement. We argue that the mainstreaming of sustainability reporting has not systematically translated into broader inclusion, stronger dialogic practices, or greater uptake of stakeholder input into organizational processes.
Corporate tax payments are vital for governments and public goods, yet tax avoidance remains widespread. Prior research on the link between corporate sustainability and tax avoidance is inconclusive, partly due to measurement issues. This study introduces engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an alternative framework, focusing on contexts where firm and government interests align. Using stakeholder theory, we examine whether firms with stronger social SDG engagement show less tax avoidance. Analyzing 1,966 firms (9,562 observations, 2015-2022), we find no significant relationship under normal conditions. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic-when interests aligned more closely-higher social SDG engagement is linked to lower tax avoidance, especially with strong governance. These results suggest firms often decouple SDG engagement from tax behavior in normal times, but crises can drive closer alignment.
Climate change is now a focal issue within business school research and education. While laudable, the focus is both inadequate and, at times, misguided. Research and courses on climate change focus primarily on human and economic systems with limited attention to the natural systems in which they are embedded and which are becoming inhospitable to human and other life forms. A growing recognition of the Anthropocene era raises questions about the viability of this continued emphasis, exposing a mismatch between the research and teaching approach being used and the geophysical reality being studied. This presents the sustainable business scholar with a dilemma between adhering to existing academic norms for publication and promotion and challenging those norms to fully address our destruction of the natural systems that sustain us. This viewpoint examines a needed reorientation of our research and teaching models.
To dispel suspicions of "greenwashing," many companies have adopted more rigorous corporate sustainability communication (CSC) practices, such as reporting an increased amount of numerical, third-party verified data. This has led to claims that greenwashing is declining. In this conceptual article, we propose a more nuanced diagnosis, arguing the importance of distinguishing between two types of greenwashing: Type I, that is, CSC practices by which companies exaggerate the extent to which they engage in actions described as socially or environmentally desirable; and Type II, that is, CSC practices by which companies falsely suggest that their actions contribute to the macro-level goal of sustainability. While Type I greenwashing may have declined, Type II greenwashing remains insufficiently conceptualized and countered, thus posing a major obstacle to mainstreaming sustainability. We identify key features of Type II greenwashing, theorize three discursive devices through which it operates, and outline ways to thwart it.
The purpose of this study is to yield new insights into the microlevel mechanisms underlying employees’ green high-intensity behavioural intentions. Using the construction industry as an example, this study examined how employees’ interpretation of environmental organisational strategies for the reuse of construction products shapes their intention to reuse, both directly and indirectly through coworkers’ proenvironmental social and personal norms. Structural equation modelling analyses ( N = 260 employees) show that perceiving an environmental strategy directly influences behavioural intentions, which is partly explained by proenvironmental norms in the workplace. These findings demonstrate how environmental organisational strategies become meaningful when employees perceive them and integrate them, which can be explained by applying a value-oriented goal-making perspective where norm activation theory provides a foundation. Therefore, internalising coworkers’ proenvironmental social norms to personal norms may be especially important. This study advances corporate sustainability research by highlighting how microlevel mechanisms can support the implementation of circular practices in organisations.
A distinct obstacle to mainstreaming sustainability is when strategic actions to integrate sustainability create tensions between a firm's established identity and its projected image. This study examines how such strategy-image tensions are managed. Based on a qualitative, longitudinal study of luxury sports car manufacturer Porsche during the introduction of electric cars, the analysis traces the discursive process of implementing strategic actions that challenge the legacy product. The findings suggest the reconciliation of strategy-image tensions is a three-stage process: detaching the image from the legacy product, constructing a positive narrative around the new product, and endorsing the fit of the new product category to the corporation. The study contributes to research on incumbent change and managing identity-related tensions. It further contributes to the literature on sustainability mainstreaming with a critical discussion of the ambivalent dynamics that arise when established firms attempt to make sustainability "fit" their legacy.
Although environmental interventions require technical and social approaches, organizations often privilege the former. This pattern's persistence remains underinvestigated. This study analyzes several years of ethnographic fieldwork in a peacebuilding- and sustainability-focused organization through the four dimensions of Connell's gender regime framework to demonstrate how professional logics in fields with asymmetric gender institutionalization produce divergent organizational gender regimes that prefer particular forms of knowledge, work, and authority. The peacebuilding domain, which has institutionalized gender frameworks, considers multiple knowledge forms authoritative and relational processes productive; the environmental domain, which lacks comparable institutionalization, privileges technical expertise over social and community-based knowledge. Consequently, organizational actors attempting to translate gender-inclusive practices across domains face epistemic and structural barriers. This study contributes to institutional logics by demonstrating how professional logics shape gender regimes through epistemic mechanisms and extends Connell's gender regime theory by linking organizational patterns to field-level institutional dynamics, with insights for environmental management.
Despite the many calls for business schools to integrate sustainable development in the curriculum and the many efforts to do so, the content remains largely on the periphery. Scholars and educators have offered numerous explanations, including ranking pressures, misaligned academic incentives, and the dominance of neoliberal ideology. While these explanations have merit, we argue that there is an even more foundational reason: macro-level sustainability topics are at odds with the individual- and organizational-level outcomes of most business disciplines. To address sustainability meaningfully, business schools need to bring macro-levels of analysis into the core curriculum, which can be accomplished by tackling complex business problems. Focusing on complex business problems invokes systems thinking, requiring students to understand the interaction between business and broader environmental and social concerns. By tackling complex problems, business schools will better prepare students for navigating and shaping a future in which economic development remains within planetary boundaries.
Reducing the carbon footprint left by humans is a vital challenge for companies in our fight to combat climate change. However, concerns persist over an alarming trend where companies appear to be merely 'shifting' their carbon emissions from domestic markets to other jurisdictions. Consequently, it is 'leaking' carbon rather than genuinely reducing emissions. Through an analysis of over 360 U.S. firms and framed by legitimacy theory, this study finds that companies facing increasingly intense pressure to legitimise their operations under stricter environmental regulations are more likely to opt for 'relocating' their carbon emissions instead of implementing tangible reductions. Intriguingly, corporate social responsibility (CSR) fails to curtail this practice; instead, it amplifies it. These results underscore the importance for environmental policymakers and academia to recognise that, as environmental regulations become more stringent, relocating carbon emissions may become increasingly common unless companies are incentivised economically to genuinely reduce their CO2 output.
Much research on organizations and the natural environment relies on self-reported corporate data of dubious reliability and accuracy. A new wave of data, originating in satellite observations, forensic genetics, hydrological maps and other sources, can help overcome these shortcomings. We identify several data sets from the natural sciences that are easily accessible and highly accurate, and provide roadmaps for management researchers to utilize them. We further explore the types of research questions these data sets enable, extending beyond the confines of environmental-financial performance relationships that have dominated previous research. By leveraging these and similar data sets, corporate sustainability researchers can obtain clearer insights into corporate environmental impact, opening doors to new avenues of inquiry.
ESG frameworks have become a central tool for aligning corporate strategies with sustainability imperatives. Yet, by reducing environmental, social, and governance dimensions to standardised metrics, conventional ESG framework risk obscuring the complex ethical commitments that arise from incommensurable societal subsystems. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory, this paper critiques ESG's tendency to privilege specific function systems - science, politics, and economics - while marginalising others such as religion, art, and education. We further introduce the tetralemma, a concept from Indian logic, to illuminate novel ways of reconciling or transcending the paradoxes inherent in integrating these domains. By combining a multifunctional approach with tetralemma thinking, we demonstrate how organisations can expand their reporting scope beyond narrow ESG categories, foster inclusive stakeholder engagement, and respond more effectively to morally fraught sustainability dilemmas. This integration ultimately reframes ESG as a flexible, context-sensitive practice that embraces societal complexity and offers a holistic route to accountability.
Companies with inherently unsustainable business models and high public salience face a paradox, as they need to construct themselves as desirable and appropriate organizations to maintain their license to operate, while at the same time profiting from practices that are fundamentally unsustainable. This paper advances our understanding of legitimation under paradoxical conditions by examining how a highly visible and inherently unsustainable company legitimizes its unsustainability. Based on a micro-level analysis of corporate sustainability reports, press releases, and company quotes in news articles, we identify both traditional legitimation strategies and paradoxical legitimation strategies, the latter of which conflict with other legitimation strategies through tensions related to boundaries, agency, and temporality. Our findings show how paradoxical legitimation strategies enable companies to sustain their unsustainability by engaging in an ongoing oscillation between claiming sustainability and defending unsustainability.
Sustainability work requires continuous reflection in a complex system of interconnected and competing demands. To shed light on the complexity and tensions of sustainability work in a controversial field, such as the textile industry, a narrative approach to sustainability work is utilised. The research data consist of individual interviews (21 participants) and four focus-group interviews (16 participants). The use of a narrative analysis reveals three prevailing organisational narratives that illustrate how sustainability work is constantly co-constructed through different organisational representatives and how they act in organisations: (1) the consolidating narrative of prestige, (2) the surrendering narrative of powerlessness and (3) the obscuring narrative of idealism. The study contributes to the extant literature by offering an understanding of sustainability work as consisting polyphonically and as constantly negotiated and evolving, and shows how narrative structures are constitutive of action in this field. It foregrounds the constitutive role of narrative structures, not merely as representational devices but as dynamic spaces through which organisational actors can generate and reduce enduring ambiguities and contradictions.
