This chapter explores the challenges that achieving corporate sustainability poses for the nature of organizational leadership and the selection and development of present and future leaders. We identify the following key challenges in moving to a sustainable society: The urgency and scale of the environmental crisis demands enacting leadership processes that serve widespread transformational change. The exponential growth in complexity of organizational purpose sets the ‘new wave’ leadership challenge to achieve the sometimes conflicting SDGs. Governmental requirements for sustainability and climate disclosure and other sustainability risks (laws, regulations, incentives, and penalties) vary widely across political units (nations, states, and municipalities). Some organizations may have reached different stages along the path to corporate sustainability in different divisions, departments, and units. Within one enterprise, employee awareness and knowledge of sustainability issues vary widely. The urgency and scale of the environmental crisis demands enacting leadership processes that serve widespread transformational change. The exponential growth in complexity of organizational purpose sets the ‘new wave’ leadership challenge to achieve the sometimes conflicting SDGs. Governmental requirements for sustainability and climate disclosure and other sustainability risks (laws, regulations, incentives, and penalties) vary widely across political units (nations, states, and municipalities). Some organizations may have reached different stages along the path to corporate sustainability in different divisions, departments, and units. Within one enterprise, employee awareness and knowledge of sustainability issues vary widely.

The heightening impact of ecological and societal crises makes sustainability an increasingly urgent imperative, requiring a fundamental shift in how we understand and practice management and business. In this book, the authors set out the key characteristics of sustainability such as its temporal and multilevel effects and highlight the complex array of sustainability risks and opportunities for business and management. Setting business within a systems perspective, the authors outline different sustainability discourses that frame how business responds to the sustainability imperative. They call for the normative and scientific approaches to sustainability to be merged so that a new transdisciplinary approach that brings together the material and relational traditions in sustainability management is developed. Sustainability work is understood as the reframing of tools, technologies, practices and business strategies to respond to the imperative. The book concludes by highlighting dynamic features of the imperative as it is shaped by the urgent need to restore and regenerate social and ecological systems. Sustainability transitions such as the Circular Economy and Net Zero are suggested as inspiration for profound business transformation. By facing the intractable complexity associated with sustainability, this book challenges students and scholars to draw from across the sciences and social sciences to understand, reflect upon and deliver responsible business outcomes in contemporary society.

Corporate sustainability is a priority for organisations, but the nature of the enabling intra-organisational activities, processes and managerial agency is not well understood. In this study, we examine the activity and agency of corporate sustainability managers through a narrative approach and the novel theoretical lens of ‘sustainability work’: purposeful and strategic activities to shape the social-symbolic context such that social and environmental outcomes are prioritised. Analysing how individuals across a range of diverse organisations and industries frame their activity, we identify three overlapping and co-occurring broad subsets of sustainability work: goal-directed, other-directed and self-directed. Through our notion of sustainability work, we contribute by recasting managerial agency in the enabling of sustainability as occurring in the social-symbolic realm and highlighting the implications in both theory and practice for the professionalisation of sustainability. JEL Classification: M10, M14

Sustainability learning is holistic and complex as it draws on diverse disciplines and can be interpreted differently within individual pedagogies. Embedding sustainability across and within business schools relies on developing suitable boundary objects. These may include representations such as models, frameworks or classificatory schemes that are malleable enough to be adapted for use within the disparate disciplines and pedagogies, yet durable enough to be recognisable and to maintain consistency across them. Boundary objects thus allow the sharing of ways of knowing or practice across various social boundaries. This paper outlines how participatory curriculum development processes can enable sustainability to be embedded in a business school curriculum. Distinct phases of the process were marked by different ways of knowing, as disciplinary-specific academics developed and embedded sustainability into and across curricula. Boundary objects were both outcomes and productive facilitators of this process. They acted as catalysts and attracted ongoing processes of dialogue, debate and meaning-making between these academics. The institutional context provided enabling conditions to legitimize outcomes from the participatory process. The process may be replicable in other business schools by the use of boundary objects.

<p>New business models forming in the circular and sharing economies are enabling transitions to the adoption of sustainable business practices. Such new business models address resource depletion, issues associated with waste management, and innovative design of products and services. Transition requires new management practices and resource stewardship models that go beyond the traditional product life cycle requiring collaborative or inter-organizational governance structures. Global market challenges are faced, such as incorporating the cost of externalities, capitalizing on impact investing, developing integrated frameworks to account for sustainability performance, and enhancing corporate resilience and adaptation in regard to climate change.</p>

In recent times, there have been increasing pressures on businesses arising from resource scarcity, commodity insecurities and waste (Lieder and Rashid, 2016). There is evidence that industrial processes have already breached several planetary boundaries (Steffen et al., 2015) and that this poses a challenge for business leaders to consider their impacts through adoption of systems thinking (Whiteman et al., 2013; Perey et al., forthcoming). Simultaneously, a projected further three billion middle-class consumers will enter the market by 2030 (Nguyen et al., 2014). Trends project upward material consumption growth per capita (Fridolin et al., 1989), and even moderate United Nations scenarios indicate that such continued upward population and consumption trends means that the equivalent of two Earths will be needed to support the human resource demand and absorption of its wastes (Footprint, 2014). In addition to these growth trends, as global supply chains become more complex and dispersed, material leakages, whereby materials are wasted in the supply chain, persist. Consequently, waste is being produced at a rate far beyond what can be absorbed or recycled by the Earth’s ecological systems (WWF, 2015).

Abstract Traditionally, wasted resources are considered a burden that imposes a cost on organizations. However, ecological sustainability principles underpinning the linked discourses of industrial ecology and the Circular Economy conceptualize waste as intrinsically valuable. Our research identified exemplar business organizations that had each changed their business models to resolve the tension of waste as a burden and/or resource. Synthesizing these cases, we found these organizations applied systems thinking to reframe their product and service offerings and developed material circular flows in their business models. Analysis of how our exemplar organizations changed their business models to tackle pressing sustainability issues and to resolve the burden–resource tension show that the focus of change is on reconceptualizing their understanding of the role of waste in the value chain of their products and services. This altered understanding of waste as a resource across their value networks initiated negotiations with their existing suppliers to also modify their supply chain practices.

This Handbook strives to enhance knowledge and application within sustainability in management education (SiME) across different academic programs, geographic regions and personal/professional contexts. Cross-disciplinary and boundary-spanning, this book focuses on specific themes and is therefore split into four distinct sections: one on theory and practice, one on transformational interventions in business programs, one on the role of external agents and the last on innovative approaches in SiME.

Over the last decade, increasing research into sustainable business models has produced a number of prototypes that address various dimensions and levels of sustainability. What exists is a patchwork of certification and disconnected frameworks that are less than systematic and comprehensive. This article addresses this lack of integrated, holistic sustainability management research and practice guides by bringing together several salient and strategic sustainability management models. The authors then forward a synthesised, integrated environmental and socio-economic sustainability model that can be used by different types of entities, at different levels of human organisation, to identify, apply, assess, evaluate, and improve processes that advance sustainability values. This article concludes by suggesting future directions for modelling and applying the concepts and practices of multiple levels, systems elements, stages, structures, and cultures to advance sustainability management.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of specific human resource management (HRM) practices in the implementation of environmental initiatives in terms of their impact on employee attitudes to the organization and to its environmental programme. Design/methodology/approach – The study used a mixed method approach comprising a survey of 675 employees and 16 semi-structured interviews undertaken across two organizations. Findings – Survey data, analysed using path analysis, showed that participation in environmental initiatives is directly associated with higher levels of employee engagement with the organization, higher rating of their organization’s environmental performance, and lower intention to quit. The qualitative study supports the quantitative data, also highlighting other aspects of environmental initiatives that may affect employee attitudes. Research limitations/implications – Future study should either collect longitudinal data or rely on data collected from two waves of data collection. Objective performance data should also be collected in order to better understand the causal effect of HRM on environmental performance. Practical implications – Our findings have implications for the business case for sustainability, providing some evidence that implementing environmental initiatives with HRM support may not only motivate staff around environmental programmes but may provide wider benefits for organizations in terms of overall job satisfaction and employee retention. Social implications – Successful implementation of environmental management initiatives have both organizational and employee level outcomes. Employees who were more aligned with their organizational environmental objectives were found to be more engaged and less likely to quit. Originality/value – This study provided both quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence to support the importance of integrating the HRM function into the implementation of environmental initiatives.

Business schools are lagging other sectors in recognising the growing importance of sustainability concerns in business decision making. Many educators blame the ambiguity of sustainability-related concepts, lack of interdisciplinary knowledge on sustainability issues and their little training in the teaching methods needed to support knowledge development in business sustainability. This paper presents findings from an exploratory study of educators at one university where sustainability is incorporated in business and other areas of the teaching curriculum and where a community of practice has been developed to share sustainability-related material across the disciplinary areas. Through the lens of the boundary objects that facilitate knowledge sharing around environmental and social aspects of corporate sustainability, the paper discusses the barriers and opportunities to engaging students with the new business models of corporate sustainability.

In this article, we explore organising narratives that underpin the generation of effective ecological solutions. We examine the processes of meaning construction in relation to the development of sustainable land management practices in the Landcare organisation in Australia. Meaning construction is situated in a variety of contexts that are themselves strongly influenced by a meta-narrative, which Taylor has labelled the “modern social imaginary”: A shared system of meanings that captures the imaginations of individuals and shapes their social groupings and society. The shift in meaning construction is reflected in the emergence of a narrative of “ecological repair” that involved a process of learning and knowledge development we have labelled protracted sense-making. Our research findings have led us to conclude that the development of successful ecological solutions require an active rewriting of the social imaginary.

Sustainable procurement and supply chain management studies are growing; however several scholars have criticised the lack of theoretical development accompanying this literature. Sustainable procurement and supply chain management activities form part of an organisation's path to adopt sustainability. Some scholars have suggested examining the application of management theories to describe the introduction of corporate sustainability to address this gap. Institutional theory is frequently used to describe how new practices are adopted in organisations and has also been applied to several corporate social responsibility studies. This conceptual paper examines the applicability of institutional theory to describe the adoption of sustainable procurement and concludes by presenting three theoretical propositions to explain sustainable procurement adoption.