On the Nature of Corporate Sustainability

The article “On the Nature of Corporate Sustainability” was directly inspired by the students in SusTec’s Corporate Sustainability lecture who asked: “What is corporate sustainability?” Their question triggered a debate which eventually led to Johannes, Julian, and Volker addressing this question more systematically. In their paper, they argue that the failure of corporate sustainability research to effectively contribute to sustainable development arises due to a fundamental ambiguity around the nature of corporate sustainability. To address the lack of concept clarity, they conduct a systematic literature review and identify 33 definitions of corporate sustainability. Adopting the Aristotelian perspective on definitions, one that promotes reducing concepts to their essential attributes, they discern four components of corporate sustainability.

These components offer a conceptual space of inquiry that, while being parsimonious, offers nuanced understanding of the dimensions along which definitions of corporate sustainability differ. Johannes, Julian, and Volker synthesize their findings in the “corporate sustainability cube” (pictured above). In the article, they also discuss implications for research and practice and outline several recommendations for how advancements in construct clarity may lead to a better scholarly understanding of corporate sustainability.