Reporting on sustainability and HRM: a comparative study of sustainability reporting practices by the world’s largest companies

As a response to the growing public awareness on the importance of organisational contributions to sustainable development, there is an increased incentive for corporations to report on their sustainability activities. In parallel with this has been the development of ‘Sustainable HRM’ which embraces a growing body of practitioner and academic literature connecting the notions of corporate sustainability to HRM. The aim of this article is to analyse corporate sustainability reporting amongst the world’s largest companies and to assess the HRM aspects of sustainability within these reports in comparison to environmental aspects of sustainable management and whether organisational attributes – principally country-of-origin – influences the reporting of such practices. A focus in this article is the extent to which the reporting of various aspects of sustainability may reflect dominant models of corporate governance in the country in which a company is headquartered. The findings suggest, first and against expectations, that the overall disclosure on HRM-related performance is not lower than that on environmental performance. Second, companies report more on their internal workforce compared to their external workforce. Finally, international differences, in particular those between companies headquartered in liberal market economies and coordinated market economies, are not as apparent as expected

Making sense of trust across cultural contexts

This chapter presents an argument that one way of better understanding how trust is made sense of across cultures is by framing it as a social construction. By doing this the fluidity and unevenness of trust is recognised, which questions any notion of trust being fixed or static. This leads us to advocate for an understanding of trust in its verb form. Trust as a social construction has been recognised before (e.g. Child & Möllering, 2003; Lewis & Weigert, 1985), but we believe the fuller consequences of this have not been adequately explored. We do this and conceptualize trust as constituted within cultural contexts that are ongoing social constructions. We also discuss how actors construct social phenomena and focus on the role of narrative in this process, leading us to conceptualize trust as a narrative process. We then discuss a possible research agenda to improve our knowledge of trust across cultures and propose four research questions to help achieve this

Paradox as a lens for theorizing Sustainable HRM: Mapping and coping with paradoxes and tensions

Paradox as a lens for theorizing Sustainable HRM: Mapping and coping with paradoxes and tension

Lernen von Nachhaltigkeit: Exploration und Exploitation als Lernmodi einer vollständig ambidextren Organisation

Organisationen, die nachhaltiger werden wollen, müssen sowohl in der sozialen, ökologischen als auch der ökonomischen Dimension lernen. Bislang wurde in der Forschung nicht beachtet, dass in jeder dieser Dimensionen (Lernfelder) die paradox verbundenen Lernprozesse Exploration und Exploitation möglich sind. Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt an dieser Forschungslücke an und diskutiert die paradoxen Spannungen des explorativen und exploitativen Lernens im nachhaltigkeitsorientierten Lernen. Hierbei wird zunächst aufgezeigt, dass Exploitation und Exploration als Lernmodi des Lernens von Nachhaltigkeit verstanden werden können und eine Typologie ambidextrer nachhaltiger Organisationstypen entwickelt. Zudem wird diskutiert, wie Organisationen beziehungsweise deren Führungskräfte mit den Lernparadoxien beim Lernen von Nachhaltigkeit umgehen können