Within a historical perspective, the definition of sustainable management has been evolving since the sixties, with a particular event triggering global awareness of management community, as mentioned previously, the Brundtland Report in 1987(Hoffman and Ehrenfeld 3).
The academic scholars studying the concept evolution agree that it has been experiencing some sort of phases, such as Industrial Environmentalism in the beginning of the sixties, a phase in which industries succeeded to discredit environmental organizations. Early in the seventies, just after the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a new phase, defined as Regulatory Environmentalism, started and companies simply focused on being compliant with law. The growth of influence of major NGO during mid eighties opened room for a new phase, designated Social Responsible Environmentalism, producing more cooperation between companies and environment activists. Proactive management of environmental issues became the norm for industries by the end of the eighties, and a new phase called Strategic Environmentalism emerged gradually (Hoffman and Ehrenfeld 8).
Finally, the phase in which we still are today, Environmental Management is seen as an opportunity to leverage competitive advantages, deriving in the broader concept of Sustainability (Hoffman and Bansal 3), which “represents a growing awareness of our vulnerabilities and collective impact on the global environment” (Hoffman and Bansal 6).
From 2000, we have seen significant acceleration of sustainable management practices, with companies pushing upstream and downstream for partners’ compliance. Again, the UN had a particular role in stimulating a behavioural change of businesses relatively to natural environment by launching the seven Millenium Development Goals.
One might conclude that the world is rapidly progressing into a “new societal revolution where sustainability is one of the central components, and that it is comparable in scale and importance to the industrial revolution” (Machado des Johansson and Burns 28), moving towards what Hoffman and Ehrenfeld identified, management sciences and practice is entering the Age of Anthropocene.
From another perspective, a sustainable organization is simply the consequence of applying the concept of citizenship, assuming that being a citizen encapsulates the responsibility of respecting the society where it operates, e.g., by respecting their employees, which in turn will become better citizens (Allemand 126). A sustainable organization helps employees overcome any potential schizophrenia they might have about defending their company (their jobs) and the general interest as citizens (Ibidem).
In conclusion, the management community is facing three themes related to the role of the social environment in understanding the natural environment: the first is an acknowledgement of the role of responsibility and morality in environmental decisions; the second, an overlap between corporate social responsibility, stakeholder theory, and the natural environment; and the third, the fact that perspectives on the natural environment are socially constructed, and often by individuals and organizations with an economic interest in the final outcome (Hoffman and Bansal 11). It is that final outcome that needs to converge to sustainable management, not the opposite, if Portugal, as a country, wants to succeed in the sustainable development endeavour.
References
Allemand, Sylvain. Les paradoxes du dévelopment durable.Editions Le Cavalier Bleu, 2007.
Hoffman, Andrew J., and John R Ehrenfeld. The Fourth Wave: Management Science and
Practice in the Age of the Anthropocene. Working Paper No. 1196. Ross School of Business, 2014.
Hoffman, Andrew J., and Pratima Bansal. The Oxford Handbook of Business and the Natural Environment. Online Publication January 2012.
Machado des Johansson, Nora, and Tom R. Burns. No bystanders any longer: social sciences, social responsibility and sustainability research in an emerging revolution. Confluências -Revista Interdisciplinar de Sociologia e Direito. Volume 16, number 1, 2014.
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