embedding sustainability in organizational culture - Network for ...

Chapter 1: Introduction
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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.