Crowdsourcing Corporate Sustainability Strategies

Corporate Sustainability Strategies

In reviewing current trends in corporate sustainability strategy and performance Ernst Young and Greenbiz (2012, p.2) argued that “over the past two decades corporate sustainability efforts have shifted from a risk based compliance focus where rudimentary, voluntary, sometimes haphazard initiatives have evolved into a complex and disciplined business imperative focused on customer and stakeholder requirements.” There is a growing awareness that many business leaders increasingly see sustainability as becoming one of the cornerstones of competition and as a significant source of opportunity for, and risk to, competitive advantage. Many business leaders have been developing sustainability plans and programmes as an integral component of their corporate strategies. A number of factors seem to be important in helping to explain this trend. These include the need to comply with a growing volume of environmental and social legislation and regulation; concerns about the cost and scarcity of natural resources; greater public and shareholder awareness of the importance of socially conscious financial investments; the growing media coverage of the activities of a wide range of anti-corporate pressure groups; and more general changes in social attitudes and values within modern capitalist societies. More specifically a growing number of companies are looking to publicly emphasize and demonstrate their commitment to sustainability in an attempt to help to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to enhance corporate brand reputation. More generally Elkington (2004, p.1-2), for example, argued that future business success depends on the ability of companies to add environmental and social value to economic value as part of the ‘triple bottom line’ (TBL), which focuses on “people, planet and profit.”

However it is important to recognise that a number of critics see the growing business interest in sustainability as a little more than a thinly veiled and cynical ploy, popularly described as ‘green wash’, designed to attract socially and environmentally conscious consumers while sweeping pressing environmental and social concerns under the carpet. So seen the moves towards sustainable marketing might be characterised by what Hamilton (2009, p.573-574) describes as “shifting consciousnesses” towards “what is best described as green consumerism.” This he sees as “an approach that threatens to entrench the very attitudes and behaviours that are antithetical to sustainability” and argues that “green consumerismhas failed to induce significant inroads into the unsustainable nature of consumption and production” (Hamilton, 2009, p.573-574). Perhaps more radically Kahn (2010, p.48) argues that “green consumerism” is “an opportunity for corporations to turn the very crisis that they generate through their accumulation of capital via the exploitation of nature into myriad streams of emergent profit and investment revenue.”