Paper info: Transformative Business Sustainability: A Framework
Title
Transformative Business Sustainability: A Framework
Authors
Beverly Wagner and Goran Svensson
Place of Publication
The paper was published at the 27th IMP-conference in Glasgow, Scotland in 2011.
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Abstract
PURPOSE OF THE PAPER
Increasing demands on businesses to be environmentally responsible – with regards to, for example, procurement, production, distribution and the market – mean that companies need to allocate sufficient resources to enable them to make efforts to significantly reduce not only their carbon footprints, but also the impact on Earth‟s life- and ecosystems (i.e. E-footprint) (Svensson, 2008) . The quest for zero-sum cycles in business should start and end with consideration for planet Earth (Svensson and Wagner, 2010).
Conscious of the impact on Earth from trade is not new, but it is only in the last part of the 20th century that the collective impact of social activities has been felt on a global scale. Today it is recognised that economic activity cannot be sustained independent of the functions and systems of the biophysical world. There have been few genuine attempts in business research focusing on Earth-to-Earth (EE) matters though the E-footprint is somewhat more to the fore and yet it is still often addressed in narrow terms. Also we intend to address these issues by describing business sustainability based upon teleology in complexity sciences (Svensson 2010).
It is the light of such failures that we introduce the concept of transformative business sustainability, which may be regarded as both a theoretical and managerial concept akin to a roadmap to plan, implement and evaluate the complexity of business sustainability. Initially our objective is to attempt to describe the concept of transformative business sustainability.
Increasing demands on businesses to be environmentally responsible – with regards to, for example, procurement, production, distribution and the market – mean that companies need to allocate sufficient resources to enable them to make efforts to significantly reduce not only their carbon footprints, but also the impact on Earth‟s life- and ecosystems (i.e. E-footprint) (Svensson, 2008) . The quest for zero-sum cycles in business should start and end with consideration for planet Earth (Svensson and Wagner, 2010).
Conscious of the impact on Earth from trade is not new, but it is only in the last part of the 20th century that the collective impact of social activities has been felt on a global scale. Today it is recognised that economic activity cannot be sustained independent of the functions and systems of the biophysical world. There have been few genuine attempts in business research focusing on Earth-to-Earth (EE) matters though the E-footprint is somewhat more to the fore and yet it is still often addressed in narrow terms. Also we intend to address these issues by describing business sustainability based upon teleology in complexity sciences (Svensson 2010).
It is the light of such failures that we introduce the concept of transformative business sustainability, which may be regarded as both a theoretical and managerial concept akin to a roadmap to plan, implement and evaluate the complexity of business sustainability. Initially our objective is to attempt to describe the concept of transformative business sustainability.