Adam Lindgreen

François Maon

Stefan Markovic

Cristina Sancha

Contemporary companies are expected to behave ethically and responsibly toward their stakeholders and to provide social and environmental good. Key stakeholder groups, including employees, consumers, investors, and public authorities, increasingly demand that companies deliver products and services in responsible yet economically sound manners and act in accordance with moral obligations and financial requirements. Such mounting societal expectations and institutional pressures relate to complex concerns, including environmental and climate impact, working conditions, and human rights, both locally and oversees. In this context, as companies now appear to commit to comprehensively tackle ethical, social, environmental, and economic challenges, concerns increasingly are raised as to whether most companies in the end can indeed contribute to societal and environmental good and transform how they operate to create value responsibly, considering the success and impact of so called corporate social responsibility or sustainability policies. In recent decades, while some companies have advanced on their social and environmental responsibility journey, other companies have engaged in ethical, social, and environmental initiatives in manipulative and insincere way, or merely as a rhetorical tool to maintain legitimacy. Together with governments and business partners, these companies are largely failing to deliver for society and the environment. Subsequently, more than ever before, understanding what it means to do business responsibly and how business actors can engage constructively in ways that support the development of resilient business practices, forms, and organizations that contribute to generate positive impact for society and the environment and generate the type of economic value needed to address the key challenges of this century is central. On this background, this edited volume sheds light on different crucial themes and approaches spanning historical, conceptual, operational, critical, practical, and prospective considerations that have animated the field of business and society in the last decades, and that are instrumental or have the potential to drive constructive research discussions and business efforts. The central aim of the book is to set the research agenda for the next five to seven years, to redefine existing areas within the context of international research, and to highlight emerging research areas in need of further investigation, representing a prestige reference work providing an overview of the subject area of responsible business, primarily for academics, researchers, postgraduate students, as well as reflective practitioners.

The Routledge Companion to Responsible Business

Christine Vallaster

Beatriz Palacios Florencio

Shumaila Yousafzai

The way organizations manage entrepreneurship has changed dramatically over the past decade. Today, organizations take account of economic issues, but they also adopt a broader perspective of their purpose including social and environmental issues (i.e. sustainability). Yet, despite its global spread, sustainable entrepreneurship remains an uncertain and poorly defined ambition with few absolutes. This book reaffirms the important need to improve comprehension and explore the subtleties of how individuals, groups, and organizations can discover, create, and seize opportunities for blended value generation, by designing and operating sustainable ventures. It examines, in an interdisciplinary fashion and across sectoral and geographical boundaries, how entrepreneurial activities can be developed to be generally consistent with sustainable development goals, as well as by whom, for what reasons, and with what implications. The Editors comprehensively review key dimensions of the sustainable entrepreneurship phenomenon to establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. The 19 chapters cover 4 main topics: Understanding the intentions and motivations for sustainable entrepreneurship Fostering and enacting sustainability through entrepreneurial action Leading and inspiring sustainable entrepreneurial action Finding the contextually grounded implications of and challenges to sustainable entrepreneurship and blended value generation This book is an important resource for entrepreneurs and policy makers as well as students in the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation, and sustainability.

Discovering, Creating and Seizing Opportunities for Blended Value Generation

Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Sankar Sen

The way organizations manage their value chain has changed dramatically over the past decade. Today, organizations take account of economic issues, but they also adopt a broader perspective of their purpose including social and environmental issues. Yet despite its global spread, sustainable value chain management remains an uncertain and poorly defined ambition, with few absolutes. The social and environmental issues that organizations should address easily can be interpreted as including virtually everything. Current literature on the topic seeks to understand the effects and management of initiatives dealing with diversity, human rights, safety, philanthropy, community, and environment. However, the penetration of social and environmental considerations into value chain management is described as ’desire lacking reality’ thereby making the idea a patchy success. The objective of this research anthology is to investigate different angles of sustainable value chain management. The book’s 27 chapters fill holes and explore new fields; the chapters are organised in five sections: Sustainable value chains - context, drivers, and barriers; Sustainable value chains - managing activities; Sustainable value chains - managing networks and collaboration; Sustainable value chains - integrative perspectives; and Sustainable value chains - specific sectorial and industry perspectives.

A Research Anthology

Sustainable Value Chain Management

François Maon

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