Purpose‐driven businesses have a stated objective to contribute to the welfare of society and the planet alongside generating shareholder value. As interest in purpose‐driven businesses grows, an emerging “purpose ecosystem” of advisers, investors, and enablers offers different types of support for businesses wanting to transition to sustainability. This paper examines how the transition towards purpose‐driven business in Australia and the United Kingdom requires addressing challenges facing this support ecosystem at three levels. First, at the individual level where support providers need (...) to build the capabilities of managers who are experiencing tensions around integrating societal and environmental purpose while facing pressure for maximizing shareholder value. Second, the support providers working within the purpose ecosystem offering professional advice and finance face their own tensions between environmental or social objectives and commercial pressures. Third, there are challenges facing actors in the ecosystems aiming to change the wider policy and institutional environment but facing lobbying from those wanting to keep “business as usual.” We identify practical implications for those parts of the purpose‐driven business ecosystem providing support. This includes building capabilities to combine social, environmental, and commercial purpose; coordination among support providers; and creating an institutional environment to avoid “purpose wash.”. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to explore the extent and nature of sustainability disclosure practices of companies from environmentally sensitive industries in India. It further investigates the influence of potential determinants on sustainability information disclosure of the companies. The study analyzed the data of 57 energy and mining companies included in NIFTY500 index at National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) for the period 2016 to 2019. In the present study, environment, social, and governance (ESG) parameters were considered to measure (...) the corporate sustainability disclosure practices. Panel data analysis was conducted to investigate the impact of possible determinants on sustainability reporting. The results indicate that variables, such as firm size, market capitalization, and a standalone sustainability reporting, are positively associated with the sustainability information disclosure of companies. The finding also suggests that policymakers should promote a standalone sustainability reporting based on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards and also broaden the existing scope of business responsibility reporting in India. Overall findings should help the policymakers and regulators to assess and advance the disclosure reforms to improve sustainability reporting in India. (shrink)

This article engages the question—what is the right business‐society relationship? We consider three perspectives that seek to address the relationship: corporate social responsibility (CSR), social entrepreneurship (SE), and conscious capitalism (CC). We take a macroapproach considering how commentary about these approaches establishes a direction for corporate practice and its relationship to key stakeholder groups. We argue that these perspectives are ‘D'iscourses that provide arguments for and articulations about the direction of corporate practice and the business‐society relationship. To organize our review (...) of each perspective, and focus our critique, for each we highlight (a) drivers and influencers, (b) core assumptions and defining features, and (c) approaches and exemplars. Although distinct, all emphasize effective business practices as key to meeting social needs. CSR suggests legitimizing business practice; SE relocates business practices; and CC seeks to reimagine/rehabilitate business for social good. Ultimately, we conclude that these Discourses lack a clear communicative focus in terms of decision making within these organizations. We attend to this and other implications, and offer avenues for further research. (shrink)

Despite growing awareness around human impacts on marine ecosystems, little action is taken to reduce the negative effects of organizations on the ocean, thus increasing risks of global collapse. In this paper, I argue that organizations act as systems of ocean destruction, and I explore how to operate a shift to organizations as systems of ocean conservation and thriving, enabling human–ocean socio‐ecological coviability. To do so, I analyze the organizational affordances of the ocean: incommensurability, open access and complex property regimes, (...) structural domination by humans and land, perceived inexhaustibility, and cognitive distance. Then, based on the transdisciplinary analysis of mechanisms of ocean destruction, I discuss the constitution of ocean negative commons and the ruining of the ocean. Lastly, based on four drivers (technology and innovation, consumption, marginalization and social orders), I suggest alternative organizing principles that might allow to manage these commons and to transform organizations to achieve socio‐ecological coviability with the ocean: degrowth, total responsibility, full cost allocation, ocean equity, and adaptive, place‐based co‐management. (shrink)

There is both individual and collective widespread concern in society about the impact of human activity and the effects of our decisions on the physical and social environment. This concern is included within the idea of sustainability. The meaning of the concept is still ambiguous and its practical effectiveness disputed. Like many other authors, this article uses as a starting point the definition proposed by the World Commission on Environment and Development, considering it to be a proposal for changing the (...) assessment of the effects of decisions, from at least two perspectives: what effects we should consider and how we should assess them. Based on this double perspective, sustainability is explored as a method for decision-making which both expands the assessment of the consequences, and also provides an objective criterion for such assessment. It will be argued that the idea of sustainability, seen from this perspective, brings to decision-making two qualities which had been partially lost: realism and impartiality. In turn, the criteria for realism and impartiality in decision-making can be used to identify the limitations of some partial approaches to sustainability, which suffer from insufficient realism, insufficient impartiality or both phenomena at once. The article concludes by demonstrating how realism and impartiality provide the basis for a new form of sustainable decision-making, which is dependent on the development of two moral virtues, prudence and benevolence, and which brings practical effectiveness and ethical sense to the concept of sustainability. (shrink)