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Top1. Introduction
Corporate sustainability research has been grown tremendously. There are a number of documented researches looking at the corporate sustainability from different angles. Examples include the survey of the development of the field of corporate sustainability from the concept of sustainable development in different stages (Dyllick & Hockerts, 2002); systems approach to corporate sustainability (Azapagic, 2003); research looking at multiple levels of corporate sustainability (Marrewijk & were, 2003); European corporate sustainability framework (Hardjono & De Klein, 2004); corporate sustainability and organizational culture (Linnenluecke & Griffiths, 2010) and defining and measuring corporate sustainability (Laine, 2014). In addition to this a recent progress report published by KPMG Corporation highlights the importance of sustainability within current business world (KPMG, 2011). However, none of these researches have been looking at the organizations’ responsibilities towards business sustainability. Arguably, a recent research documented the uptake of corporate social responsibility initiatives in developing countries (Memon et al., 2014); but lacks to cover the aspects which could be considered as organizational responsibilities towards ensuring business sustainability. Thus, this research aims to investigate the organizational responsibilities towards business sustainability.
Business sustainability has different organizational aspects and approaches. We are anchoring our research questions on the work reported by (Muff & Dyllick, 2014) for considering different approaches of business sustainability (Table 1). The work reported by (Muff & Dyllick, 2014) in this paper proposes a framework for considering different organizational aspects of business sustainability. The main themes highlighted by the authors in this work cover the typical business functioning model namely input, process and output. Although this sounds to be a generic overview of business functioning, this thinking is more process driven compared to early approaches such as (Costanza & Patten, 1995); (Marshall & Toffel, 2005) and has the base potential to be developed and applied to businesses in their day to day operations in ensuring their sustainability. Hence, our research questions formulated based on this framework are presented below:
Table 1. Typology of business sustainability after (Muff & Dyllick, 2014)
Typology of Business Sustainability | Concerns (What?) | Organisational Perspective (How?) | Values Created (What for?) |
Business-as-usual | Economic concerns | Inside-out | Shareholder Value |
Business sustainability 1.0 | Three-dimensional concerns | Inside-out | Refined shareholder value |
Business Sustainability 2.0 | Three-dimensional concerns | Inside-out | Triple bottom line |
Business Sustainability 3.0 | Starting with sustainability challenges | Outside-in | Creating value for the common good |