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Chapter 1: Introduction 8 ChAPTER 1 Introduction In the last decade, sustainability has become an increasingly integral part of doing business in any industry. For companies to balance their financial, social, and environmental risks, obligations and opportunities, sustainability must move from being an add-on to ‘just the way we do things around here.’ As organizations work through these changes, business leaders are starting to recognize that organizational culture plays a fundamental part in the shift toward sustainability. Yet, despite a multitude of corporate sustainability reports that describe sustainability as ‘the way we do business,’ most business leaders lack a clear understanding of how to embed sustainability in their day-today decisions and processes. Leading firms, including those that make up the Network for Business Sustainability’s Leadership Council, are looking to understand how to ‘sustain’ sustainability over the long term.
Chapter 1: Introduction 9 Every year, the Network for Business Sustainability (nbs.net) funds systematic reviews based on the top priorities identified by its Leadership Council. In 2009- 2010, the Leadership Council identified embedding sustainability in corporate culture as a knowledge priority. This project aims to summarize what we know about how firms go about making sustainability an everyday, enduring part of the organization, something that has both penetration and traction. In writing this report, our aims were to summarize what we know (and don’t know) about embedding sustainability in organizational culture and to provide a framework for thinking about the practices that may support this process. To this end, we’ve undertaken a large-scale systematic review of both academic and practitioner sources related to embedding sustainability in organizational culture. Given that culture is a broad topic, we initially cast a wide net. We identifed 13,756 academic and practitioner articles and reports using an extensive set of keywords related to the topic. Our focus was on work that specifically addressed embedding sustainability; however, we also saw the potential to learn from other well-studied analogous cultural interventions such as health & safety, highreliability organizations, legal compliance, and the implementation of total quality management. Preliminary screening narrowed this pool to 701 of the most promising sources. These sources were reviewed in detail to identify 96 highly relevant materials on embedding sustainability. This included 82 academic articles and 14 practitioner articles and books that explored the theme of sustainability and culture. We also retained 83 sources that examined analogous cultural interventions. Using this data set of 179 sources, we conducted extensive, detailed analysis and synthesis of the materials to extract the various practices that may support embedding sustainability. In conducting our review, we found instances where practitioner knowledge leads theory. Practitioners are advocating practices that researchers have not yet studied in any detail. We also found numerous instances where academics proposed practices that were not directly tested in their own work. Rather than limit our examination to empirically tested practices, we identified all the relevant practices regardless of the level of empirical support and documented whether each instance had been proposed, empirically tested and supported or was empirically tested and unsupported. Based on this analysis, we developed the framework on embedding sustainability presented in this report. The full details of our methods are presented in Appendix A of this report. The set of articles, reports and books that make up our data set are listed in Appendix B. Our review of previous research and practice reveals the following issues: • Embedding sustainability into culture is still an emerging field of research. There has been a limited amount of research addressing how to embed sustainability in organizational culture. In this area, practice often leads theory. • The research that has been conducted on embedding sustainability continues to be dominated by exploratory, case-based research with an emphasis on success stories. • There is a lack of clear definitions (what academics call construct clarity) in this field—terms are used somewhat interchangeably and are often not defined. This report attempts to address some of these issues by presenting a framework to help practitioners evaluate their efforts to embed sustainability and to help researchers contextualize their own work within the larger field. Additionally, we have tried to lend ‘construct clarity’ by providing a set of working definitions with examples to begin to establish a common vocabulary for the field and to differentiate terms that both practitioners and academics have previously used interchangeably. What is a culture of sustainability? To define what we mean by a culture of sustainability, it will be helpful to understand what we mean by sustainability and also what we mean by culture. While there are many different definitions of sustainability, the most frequently cited comes from the World Council on Economic Development, which advocates operating in ways that “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland, 1987). In practice, business sustainability consists of managing the ‘triple bottom line.’ This includes decision-making that takes into consideration financial, social, and environmental risks, obligations and opportunities. This means more than just accounting for environmental and social impacts in corporate reporting. Sustainable businesses are resilient and create economic value, healthy ecosystems and strong communities. Sustainable businesses survive over the long term because they are intimately connected to healthy economic, social and environmental systems.
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