The objective of this article is to create an understanding of how the UN sustainable development goals can be used to steer stakeholder engagement for transformative change, meeting global challenges, and navigate a new business-societal practice driven by a values-based business model. The article is a conceptual study with case studies of the role that the SDGs play in multi-stakeholder dialog via the kind of sustainable business-societal practice that takes corporate social responsibility to the next level, where it is embedded (...) in a values-based business model, creating a new meaning to effect real business-societal transformation. Multi-stakeholder dialog implies interactive and communicative engagement with the full range of stakeholders in order to create value for all, employing a societal perspective and using the value network as a basis for effective decision-making. We explain our methodological approach by presenting multi-stakeholder dialog in practice, in the form of multiple case studies. These empirical settings consisted of two values-driven privately owned companies with a strong reporting mechanism and a clear transformation agenda based on the SDG challenges: IKEA and Löfbergs. The empirical study provides the basis for our proposed model. This article makes an original contribution to the study of the use of SDGs in management and service research. It investigates steering and navigating processes in specific contexts in order to determine what should be subject to legal enforcement and what comprises moral and/or ethical value, particularly at the societal level. (shrink)

Complex and urgent challenges including climate change and the significant decline in biodiversity provide a broad agenda for interdisciplinary scholars interested in the implications facing businesses, humanity, and other species. Within this context of sustainability, persistent conflicts between key paradigms create substantial barriers against—but also opportunities for—developing new conceptual approaches and theoretical models to understand and respond to these critical issues. Here, I revisit paradigmatic tensions to assess their impact on research and debate on sustainability, ethics, and business. Drawing on (...) relational ontology and values of nature that recognise humanity’s tight embeddedness within the planetary ecosystem, I examine how conceptualising sustainability as the pursuit of life might generate new insights for research and practice into the wider transformation needed to sustain and restore socioecological systems. The aim here, however, is not to reconcile these paradigmatic tensions but instead use them as a fruitful lens for examining the implications for sustainability, while acknowledging the inherent ethical dilemmas for individuals, organisations, and society. (shrink)

Navigating the demands of translational research requires not only addressing scientific issues, but also managing conflicting sociopolitical, cultural, psychosocial, epistemic, and ethical relationships across diverse communities and academic disciplines. Data and analysis of intensive interviews on these phenomena with researchers are presented here, which led to the co-design of a larger, ongoing study in a neuropsychiatric research community. The results generated a set of hypotheses—particularly regarding conflicts and challenges at the neuroscience-neuroethics interface as experienced by neuroscientists—which have not been fully (...) articulated or examined in the neuroethics literature. Results suggest that knowledge system-level dynamics which limit reflexive engagement with the emotional-intellectual challenges of interdisciplinary work pose barriers to neuroethics-neuroscience integration. This article describes the data and methods which provide the foundation for a qualitative metascience model designed in response to these psychosocial and sociocultural challenges. The goal of qualitative metascience is to cultivate healthier and more translationally impactful neuroscience-neuroethics research ecosystems. (shrink)