Engagement for supply chain sustainability: A guide

Public and investor expectations about corporate sustainability performance and disclosure are growing rapidly and extending into company supply chains. Companies are increasingly recognising that their supply chain holds both substantial risk and opportunity. As a result, many companies have started to engage creatively and proactively with their diverse supply chains to leverage their collective capacity to address sustainability challenges. Existing supplier engagement frameworks typically promote progressive steps towards collaboration as the ideal form of supplier engagement, but our research shows that this insufficiently captures the complexity of actual company-supplier relations. Instead, there are a variety of suitable engagement approaches that can be positioned along a spectrum between more coordinated and more collaborative. This spectrum of approaches applies to individual companies working with single suppliers, as well as to multiple companies partnering across industries and with other stakeholders to address wider supply chain challenges. Supply chain sustainability outcomes depend on your company’s ability to find the approach or combination of approaches that best align with current circumstances. Key considerations include your company’s desired objectives, supply chain characteristics, and the readiness of both your company and your suppliers

Caring, Courage and Curiosity: Reflections on our roles as scholars in organizing for a sustainable future

The Covid-19 pandemic made important societal issues even more pressing and poignant to organizations. I explore how the pandemic surfaced attention to the vulnerability and resilience of organizations and organizing, and reflect on our responsibility as organizational scholars to think and act differently about our work as a result. I consider how we might do this individually and collectively, arriving at suggestions for how to advance organization theory and its relevance to contemporary organizing through: (1) directing our care to multiple issues that need attention; (2) having the courage to step away from familiar modes of inquiry and styles of theorizing to explore these; and (3) using our curiosity to develop nuanced explanations that match the complex, systemic nature of the issues themselves

Constructing the License to Operate: Internal Factors and their Influence on Corporate Environmental Decisions

Voluntary programs intended to improve corporate environmental practices have proliferated in recent years. Why some businesses choose to participate in such voluntary programs, while others do not, remains an open question. Recent work suggests that companies’ environmental practices, including their decisions to participate in voluntary programs, are shaped by a license to operate comprised of social, regulatory, and economic pressures. Although these external factors do matter, by themselves they only partially explain business decision making, since facilities subject to similar external factors often behave differently. In this article, we draw from organizational theory to explain why we would expect a company’s license to operate to be ultimately constructed by internal factors, such as managerial incentives, organizational culture, and organizational identity, as these shape both interpretations of the external pressures and organizational responses to them. Using qualitative data from an exploratory study of matched facilities that reached different decisions about participating in a prominent voluntary environmental program, we then report evidence indicative of the role of these internal factors in shaping facilities’ environmental decisions. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research that could further develop understanding of how internal organizational characteristics influence environmental management decisions, including those concerning participation in voluntary programs

Constructing the License to Operate: Internal Factors and their Influence on Corporate Environmental Decisions

Voluntary programs intended to improve corporate environmental practices have proliferated in recent years. Why some businesses choose to participate in such voluntary programs, while others do not, remains an open question. Recent work suggests that companies’ environmental practices, including their decisions to participate in voluntary programs, are shaped by a license to operate comprised of social, regulatory, and economic pressures. Although these external factors do matter, by themselves they only partially explain business decision making, since facilities subject to similar external factors often behave differently. In this article, we draw from organizational theory to explain why we would expect a company’s license to operate to be ultimately constructed by internal factors, such as managerial incentives, organizational culture, and organizational identity, as these shape both interpretations of the external pressures and organizational responses to them. Using qualitative data from an exploratory study of matched facilities that reached different decisions about participating in a prominent voluntary environmental program, we then report evidence indicative of the role of these internal factors in shaping facilities’ environmental decisions. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research that could further develop understanding of how internal organizational characteristics influence environmental management decisions, including those concerning participation in voluntary programs

Bringing the biophysical to the fore: Re-envisioning organizational adaptation in the era of planetary shifts

The nature and scope of changes in organizations’ external environments is without precedent due to planetary shifts, or major changes in earth’s biophysical systems. Our theories of organizational adaptation lack the capacity to explain what will be needed on behalf of business organizations, and their strategists and managers, to adjust to these shifts. In this essay, we review organizational adaptation theory and explain why it falls short of offering adequate explanations in an era of planetary shifts. We then draw on ecological theories of adaptation, with their focus on social-ecological systems and panarchy, to suggest ways to advance organizational adaptation theory for our times

Facilitating regional industrial symbiosis: Network growth in the UK’s National Industrial Symbiosis Programme

In the years since the discovery of Kalundborg’s long-lived network of resource exchanges, industrial symbiosis, and its potential for reducing the environmental impact of industrial activity on a local or regional scale, has been the subject of intense interest. Industrial symbiosis is defined as the enlistment of geographically proximate facilities in the “physical exchange of materials, energy, water, and by-products” (Chertow, 2000: 314). While some industrial symbiosis occurs between firms that are closely co-located, such as those in the same industrial park (see Chapters 4 and 6), other efforts to develop industrial symbiosis are undertaken on regional geographic scales. This chapter considers regional-scale industrial symbiosis, and, in particular, the development of a network of industrial symbiosis facilitated by a single brokering organization

The Evolution of Facilitated Industrial Symbiosis

While much work has been done on the conditions surrounding the emergence and establishment of industrial symbiosis, new attention is being paid to understanding the evolution of industrial symbiosis over time. We demonstrate empirically how a new facilitated industrial symbiosis initiative developed and evolved over an eight‐year period. We explore its network evolution by considering how the facilitator’s actions enabled and precluded two fundamental network processes – serendipitous and goal‐directed processes. We discuss implications for a more generalized theory of industrial symbiosis development by exploring why and how different evolutionary trajectories may unfold

Organizational dynamics in industrial ecosystems: Insights from organizational theory

This chapter presents three important and inter-related perspectives in organizational theory - institutional theory, field theory, and social network theory – that together shed light on the organizational dynamics inherent in and critical to the development of industrial ecosystems. Within the social science literature, these theories provide a language and set of conceptual tools for holistically analyzing the formal and informal influences of the broader social environment on a company, its possible actions within this environment, and associated outcomes. Such an understanding also sheds light on the constraints and opportunities that individual decision makers face and enables a better understanding of agents’ behavior, whether that of individuals or organizations, in bringing about the changes that industrial ecology demands

Sustainable development for a better world: contributions of leadership, management, and organizations

[first paragraph] On September 25th 2015, all 193 member countries of the United Nations (UN) adopted a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designed to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all as part of a new global “Agenda 2030” (United Nations, 2015). Building on the earlier UN Millennium Development Goals and seeking to complete what had been left undone, this new agenda for sustainable development laid out a bold ambition: “We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty ... and to heal and secure our planet. We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path. As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind.