The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/2042-5961.htm

Corporate
Integrating corporate sustainability
sustainability and strategy for and strategy
business performance
Vikram P. Murthy 5
Academy for Collaborative Futures, Sydney, Australia

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make business the centrepiece of its inquiry into responses
to the sustainable development challenge.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the individual firm as its lens for viewing the
sustainability challenge. It explores and synthesises the new strategic capabilities that business will
require to meet this challenge and how these can contribute to sustainable competitive advantage.
It argues that to focus management attention and understanding, these capabilities must be rooted in
existing strategy paradigms. It cites India, a developing economy exemplar, to posit the compelling
rationale for making corporate sustainability an integral part of business strategy for the developing
world as well. It sounds an important cautionary note that – notwithstanding corporate acceptance of
the urgent need – building sustainability, as a strategic business capability will still require significant
management attention and efforts.
Findings – The prevailing social and environmental challenge that are an intractable negative
outcome of development underscore the equal and vital significance of integrating corporate
sustainability into business strategy in both developing and developed countries.
Originality/value – Inducting the conclusion that society needs to be a key consideration in
a business’s strategy, this paper underscores the essential business logic that can make it so – a
causative flow from key sustainability-related resources to strategic capabilities and thence to
potential sustainable competitive advantages for the firm.
Keywords India, Sustainable development, Competitive advantage, Developing countries,
Business performance, Corporate sustainability, Business strategy, Natural capitalism
Paper type Conceptual paper

The firm as the unit of inquiry into sustainable development

This paper uses the individual firm or business as its lens to view the sustainability
challenge. It is from this vantage point that the “driving forces” (Wilkinson, 2009) in
the mega-environment, of “rapid technological diffusion”, “extensive environmental
threats”, and “vast current inequalities of income and power” (Sachs, 2008, p. 8) are
viewed. The dystopian scenarios of undermined global governance, social unrest, and
ineffective safeguards that may arise from these critical uncertainties (World Economic
Forum (WEF), 2012, pp. 16-27) are also contemplated from this firm-centric mindset.
There is a temporal identifier for this prevailing era of relentless and dynamic
uncertainty that the above description foregrounds. It is conceptually useful because it
highlights the decade and more since the start of the millennium as the vanguard of
over two centuries of Anthropocene, an epoch where humanity has seriously disturbed
many critical earth systems (Crutzen, 2009). Amongst the more impactful and
World Journal of Entrepreneurship,
potentially deleterious markers of business’s macro-environment landscape in this era Management and Sustainable
are chronic fiscal imbalances, greenhouse gas emissions, global governance failure, Development
Vol. 8 No. 1, 2012
unsustainable population growth, critical systems failure, overexploitation of species, pp. 5-17
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
and mismanaged natural cycles (WEF, 2012, p. 11; Sachs, 2010, pp. 7-9). This is the 2042-5961
overarching sustainability challenge. DOI 10.1108/20425961211221598
WJEMSD There are two compelling reasons for making business the centrepiece of any
8,1 inquiry into responses to this challenge. The first is a present and clearly articulated
understanding on the part of government and civil society that, “business leadership
is needed in adopting efficiency measures, mobilising capital, creating new markets,
developing new technologies, driving innovation, deepening our skills base and
developing partnerships across the whole community” (Rudd, 2008). The second is the
6 complementary realisation on the part of business that it must pro-actively lead on
this issue because by “playing the bystander” it will “recklessly” ignore “a significant
shift in its market environment” (Hoffman, 2007, p. 34). On the basis that business’s
strategies and its leadership responses are correlated to changing environments, it
should be possible to broadly link its different responses to the particular
characteristics of this challenge (Murthy and McKie, 2009, p. 51).
This paper will therefore: explore the form and substance of the sustainable
development challenge; synthesise the new strategic capabilities that business will
require to meet this challenge; and root these capabilities in existing strategy
paradigms. It concludes by stressing the importance of its findings for both emerging
and developed economies.

Sustainable development and changing perspectives on the role of business

There have been significant temporal shifts in the roles that business has been
progressively assigned and pro-actively sought in its unfolding colloquy with
government, NGOs, and civil society with regards to sustainable development.
Traditionally, governments and NGO groups have looked to the private sector solely
as a funding source to support poverty reduction and make philanthropic donations
(de Ferranti, 2006). This limited expectation was justified on the grounds that
this was one way of “ameliorating the worst consequences of foreign direct
investment [y] especially in the poorest countries” (Blowfield, 2005, p. 517). On
business’s part there has been a tacit understanding that “while the market may
punish a firm for irresponsible behaviour, such reaction is slow and usually linked to
ethical transgressions, rather than failures with regards to social initiatives” (Boyle and
Boguslaw, 2007, p. 115). There have been fundamental gaps and contradictions
between commercial goals and development ones that have led corporations to be
historically viewed more as a cause of the problem rather than its solution.
This view has been changing progressively with time to the extent that business
has been recast as a key stakeholder in the sustainable development conversation
alongside government, civil society, and NGOs. The modern mileposts in this
transition mirror on-going refinement in the conception of sustainable development
beginning with the Report of the world commission on environment and development:
our future (Brundtland, 1987). This seminal report serves to foreground the three
vectors of the sustainable development debate – economic growth, needs of the
poor, and environmental limits – and extends their impacts intergenerationally.
While business has not been explicitly mentioned in the report, it could be construed;
however, that the report related sustainability to corporations and economic prosperity
by the way it defined the term “sustainable development” (WCED, 1987, p. 43).
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro provided an additional impetus that
resulted in widespread acceptance of the definition of sustainable development by
business leaders (Dyllick and Hockerts, 2002). Business had begun to consider itself a
key stakeholder in any debate on adaptation and mitigation strategies to prepare the
planet and humankind to “meet the basic needs of all, moderate the use of natural
resources and renew the earth’s depleting finite resources” (Shrivastava, 1995, p. 938). Corporate
The challenge for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries was sustainability
further framed by a vision that was distilled into the Millennium Development Goals
in 2000 – “a world with less poverty, hunger and disease, greater survival prospects for and strategy
mothers and their infants, better educated children, equal opportunities for women and
a healthier environment” (United Nations, 2006, p. 3). For its part, private enterprise
was formally invited to contribute directly to the goals through core pursuits such as 7
increasing productivity and job creation, or seeking opportunities for service delivery
through public-private partnerships (Commission on the Private Sector Development,
2004, p. 137).

Sustainable development and business’s new realities

The multiplicity of definitions and the broad remits they invest in the term “sustainable
development” are understandable in the light of the various political, public and
academic influences that have shaped this domain over time. These influences include:
“the conservation movement of the early twentieth century, the environmental and
counter-technology movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘no growth’ philosophy
which emerged in the 1970s, as well as contributions from the discipline of ecology.
During the 1980s, social issues became more prominent, including human rights, the
quality of life as well as poverty” (Linnenluecke and Griffiths, 2010, pp. 357-8).
The concept has expanded even further since then and now has a focus on economic
profits, social impact and the environment – the triple bottom line (Elkington, 1998).
This continuing augmentation of the term sustainability has brought with it the
criticism that it has become “too broad in its scope to be relevant to organisations”
(Banerjee, 2001, p. 42). It has also served to underline business’s enlightened
self-interest in demanding voice and vote on this issue. This is because the new
and cascading realities of sustainability make anticipation and/or containment of the
sustainable development opportunity and/or threat increasingly onerous for business.
Each of these realities is discussed in turn below.

Trade-offs
The first reality is the dominant logic of trade-off that has coloured this debate. The
philosophical origins of this logic harks back to the enlightenment and Malthus’s
(1798/2004) compelling if unpopular arguments at the time, that unfettered
improvement in the human condition would be ultimately thwarted by the strong
and constantly operating check of subsistence. Almost two centuries later, The Limits
to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind,
first published in the early 1970s, stressed that, “continuing ‘business as usual’
policies through the next few decades will not lead to a desirable future, or even to
meeting basic human needs” (cited in Meadows and Meadows 2007, p. 196). This
trade-off mindset between economic development and environmental and social
security was further reinforced by the definition of the term “sustainable development”
(WCED, 1987, p. 43). This dominant zero-sum and “extremely cautionary” view of
sustainable development has spawned a second reality (Murthy, 2009, p. 213).

Moral free space

The second reality concerns the ambiguity that now surrounds the meaning of ethical
business practice in specific economic interactions (Barge and Oliver, 2003, p. 132). As
an example, “broadly framed investments in poverty reduction do not fit neatly into
WJEMSD business strategies focused on short-term cost-benefit analysis” (Boyle and Boguslaw,
8,1 2007, p. 103).
In a related vein, the business’s choice of the sustainability issue that it wishes to
pursue could be constrained by its markets. For example, social issues are generally
given more political, economic, and media emphasis in developing countries in
comparison to environmental, ethical or stakeholder issues (Schmidheiny, 2006).
8 Sustainability has therefore become a normative concept in which ethical belief
systems converge to limit the “moral free space” of business (Donaldson and Dunfee,
1999, p. 38; Gladwin et al., 1995). This in turn creates a third reality for business.

Persistent notions of equilibrium

The third reality is a persistent notion of equilibrium that is threaded-through
conceptions of sustainability. This is best foregrounded in Costanza et al. (1991)
description of sustainability as:
A relationship between dynamic human economic systems and larger-dynamic, but normally
slower-changing ecological systems, in which: a. Human life can continue indefinitely;
b. Human individuals can flourish, and; c. Human cultures can develop; but in which the
effects of human activities remain within bounds, so as not to destroy the diversity,
complexity, and function of the ecological life support system (p. 8).
The second-order effects of such a dynamically balanced relationship on human beings
and commerce is captured by Hawken’s (1993) homily:
Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by
people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to
produce for future generations. It can also be expressed as [y] leave the world better than
you found it, take no more than you need. Try not to harm life or the environment, and make
amends if you do (p. 139).
In the aggregate these three cascading realities will have significant impacts on
business performance. In order to succeed, business may need to eschew vaunted
post-industrial business strategies for sustainable competitive advantage. Instead it
may have to build competitive advantages in business areas and by means that have
been hitherto unfamiliar.

The pressure to learn anew “what works”

Globalisation is an evidenced example of just such a dramatic reorientation in
company strategy. Once considered a redoubtable competitive advantage by business
because of the sustained economic growth it has generated for a generation, it no
longer measures up to the new metrics of sustainable development. Against these
benchmarks benefits have been uneven and the economic disparity between and
within countries that it has created have been stark (WEF, 2011). van Marrewijk (2003)
dubs it a “pathological system” (p. 98) and Korten (2001) lists its outcomes as the
“three-fold global crisis of deepening poverty, social disintegration, and environmental
degradation” (p. 13).
The on-going conundrum for business is best described in Lubin and Esty’s (2010)
summation:
Over the past 10 years, environmental issues have steadily encroached on businesses’
capacity to create value for customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Globalised
workforces and supply chains have created environmental pressures and attendant business
liabilities [y] Externalities such as carbon dioxide emissions and water use are fast
 becoming material [y] These forces are magnified by escalating public and governmental Corporate
concern about climate change, industrial pollution, food safety, and natural resource depletion
(p. 44). sustainability
Business is struggling with the paradox of redirecting its attention from its single
and strategy
traditional objective of financial performance to two additional vectors of strategic
performance, social and environmental sustainability. The seemingly equal importance
attached to all three is reflected well in Jones and Kramer’s (2010) equivocal 9
description below:
Social and human sustainability comprises the development and fulfilment of people’s needs
and maintenance of social relationships that will thrive in the long term. Environmental
sustainability refers to the protection and renewal of the biosphere for present and future
generations. Financial sustainability refers to the ability of the organisation to provide for its
proprietors’ needs now and into the future (pp. 250-1).
When viewed from the purely economic corner of the proposition (McDonough, 2009),
the apparently conflicted nature of the demands of social and environmental
sustainability goals on the one hand and the financial and commercial objectives
of business on the other hand, are in sharp relief. It is this counterpoint that Siegel
(2009) asserts when he says that:
Managers of publicly traded firms have a fiduciary responsibility to adopt “green
management” practices only if such actions complement the organisation’s business
and corporate-level strategies. They should not engage in such activities for “moral”
reasons or in response to societal pressure alone, but rather in response to a legitimate
demand for green management practices from groups that can directly benefit the
firm (p. 5).
In the balance, it maybe fair to argue that the performance of business with regard
to sustainability is at best mixed with most companies being oblivious to the
challenges and opportunities surfaced by sustainability issues (Frankel, 1998). This
suggests that business must actively seek to identify, understand and build those
new strategic capabilities that will help it succeed in a sustainable world. More
importantly it must do all this using the “tools of the strategist” so that the “issue is
best addressed” (Porter and Reinhardt, 2007, p. 22). This is the focus of the section
that follows.

Incorporating sustainability into business strategy

Porter and Kramer (2006) make a compelling argument that business “must integrate a
social perspective into the core frameworks it already uses to understand competition
and guide its business strategy” (p. 84). They contend that any sustainability approach
that is “fragmented” and “disconnected from business and strategy” will “obscure
many of the greatest opportunities for companies to benefit society” (Porter and
Kramer, 2006, p. 80). The proliferation of overlapping “concepts such as sustainable
development, corporate citizenship, sustainable entrepreneurship, Triple Bottom Line,
business ethics, and corporate social responsibility” and the ensuing confusion
and impediments in implementation of a coherent corporate sustainability strategy are
both an evidence and outcome of such fragmentation (van Marrewijk, 2003, pp. 95-6;
Faber et al., 2005).
The case therefore exists for integrating sustainability issues into business
strategy and more importantly thereafter, using them as levers for value-creation and
WJEMSD sustainable competitive advantage. Yet, as Gladwin et al. (1995) observed in the period
8,1 leading up to 1994:
Attention to nonhuman nature is absent from the strategic management literature. Phrases
such as biosphere, environmental quality, ecosystem, or sustainable development are virtually
absent from the leading management journals (appearing less than 0.003% of the abstracts of
articles contained in the ABI/Inform Database from January 1990 to January 1994) (p. 874).
10
In the 15 years thereafter to the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the
progress on the subject of “making social impact integral to the overall strategy”
(Porter and Kramer, 2006, p. 90) has remained desultory as underlined by
Crews (2010) observation that “the focus of much of the research [in sustainability]
is on evaluation and monitoring, with little attention to strategy formulation, and
implementation” (p. 15).
The starting point for such integrated strategy formulation is conceptualising a
sustainability framework for the business. As Selznick (1957) advised so presciently
more than 50 years ago, this requires understanding the business’s “external
expectation” and matching that with its “internal state” by developing “distinctive
competences” (pp. 67-74). External expectations such as environmental regulation,
standards set by governments, and pressures resulting from customer groups and
community provide useful stimuli to business (Howard-Grenville, 2006). They signal
the “foreseeable change in the social, political, and macroeconomic context” of the firm
and its industry (Christensen et al., 1982, pp. 179-80).
The business’s response to these signals provides a partial understanding of how
external environment and the opportunities and threats therein, guide its actions. From
a sustainability perspective, it explains for example, the forces that drive it to minimise
emissions and waste, limit life cycle cost of products, and reduce the environmental
burden of firm growth (Hart, 1995, p. 992). However, if these merely result in the
development of practices with the limited objective of control and compliance, then
business’s response has been partial, reactive and tactical. What it needs to fully
comprehend in addition to its external expectation therefore, is the structure and
content of its internal state and the nature of its distinctive competence: i.e., its key
resources and capabilities and the sustainable competitive advantages that could
potentially accrue from their leverage.
One strategy paradigm that recognises the potential of valuable, rare, inimitable
and non-substitutable firm resources to generate competitive advantage is the
resource-based view (Barney, 1991, p. 99; Barney, 2001; Wernerfelt, 1984). Augmenting
this paradigm in the light of the sustainability challenge Hart (1995) has argued:
“It is likely that strategy and competitive advantage in the coming years will be
rooted in capabilities that facilitate environmentally sustainable economic activity – a
natural-resource-based view of the firm” (p. 991).
Hart (1995) has proposed a conceptual classification for this natural-resource-based
view, where three strategic capabilities of pollution prevention, product stewardship,
and sustainable development, have been founded on three key firm resources of
continuous improvement, stakeholder integration and shared vision, respectively.
These three strategic capabilities could each then conceivably yield the business
sustainable competitive advantages. Pollution prevention, which seeks to prevent
waste and emissions, could give a sustainable competitive advantage of overall lower
costs. Product stewardship, which expands this prevention to include the entire value
chain and life cycle of the business’s product systems, creates the potential for
competitive advantage through strategic pre-emption. Sustainable development, Corporate
which reduces the environmental burden and increases the economic benefits for sustainability
lesser-developed markets, could deliver a competitive advantage of future position
(Hart, 1995, p. 992; Hart and Dowell, 2011, p. 1466). and strategy
Subsequent iterations of the original classification, additions to it from other strategy
paradigms, and practitioner and scholarly inputs have made the natural-resource-based
view comprehensive and robust. For example, the strategic capability of sustainable 11
development has been separated into two distinct capabilities: clean technology and base
of pyramid (BoP) (Prahalad and Hart, 2002). In addition, the explicatory strengths of the
dynamic capabilities perspective, with its emphasis on adaptation within ambiguous and
dynamic markets, have informed the study of clean technology and BoP. This is because
the context in which firms develop capabilities to deal with these issues is highly
complex and ambiguous (Teece et al., 1997, p. 509; Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Dierickx
and Cool, 1989; Aragon-Correa and Sharma, 2003).
The natural-resource-based view resonates with sustainability experts and their
“roadmap for natural capitalism” (Lovins et al., 2007, p. 172). The strategic capabilities
that it enumerates correlate well with the four interlinked shifts in business that
proponents of natural capitalism advocate: first, radical resource productivity through
cradle-to-cradle and whole-system design tenets (McDonough et al., 2003, p. 436) and
innovative environmentally friendly technologies; second, biomimetic production with
closed biological and technical nutrient cycles (Benyus and Baumeister, 2002, p. 26;
McDonough, 2005, p. 36); third, a solutions-based business model where value is
delivered as a flow of services (Lovins et al., 2007, p. 174); and lastly, reinvestment in
natural capital through an augmented multiple capitals framework (Bent and Draper,
2007; Porritt, 2006).
It also makes common voice with academics who have been insisting for almost two
decades that firms needed to cultivate an emerging set of sustainability-related
capabilities like waste minimisation, green product design, and technology co-operation
in the developing world in order to enjoy a sustainable competitive advantage in the
future (Gladwin, 1992; Kleiner, 1991). The list of critical capabilities has only grown in
the interim to include, for example the ability to anticipate and shape regulation; the
capability to manage green know-how; and the ability to understand what customers
want and to figure out different ways to meet their needs (Nidumolu et al., 2009, p. 60).
Such sustainability-related capabilities help firms create and capture private and social
value as McWilliams and Siegel (2011) demonstrate so compellingly with CSR.
Figure 1 serves to collate the key points from the preceding discourse. It depicts the
causative flow from key sustainability-related resources to strategic capabilities and
thence to potential sustainable competitive advantages for the business.

The significance of corporate sustainability as a strategic capability for the

developing world
The core arguments from the previous section have as much if not more significance
for developing countries in comparison to the developed world. This is because
developing countries are bearing the brunt of the impact of phenomena like
globalisation, foreign direct investment, economic growth and business activity
(World Bank, 2006). Globalisation in particular has evidenced markedly deleterious
outcomes and its ensuing problems have been increasingly intractable and difficult
to ignore.
WJEMSD SCA
(Unique value-creating strategy)
8,1
1. Lower cost
2. Differentiation
3. High-performance routines shaped by processes and positions
4. Pre-emption
5. Future position
12 6. Reputation/legitimacy
7. Long-term growth

Capabilities
(Performance stemming from resources and routines)
1. Pollution prevention
2. Waste minimisation
3. Product stewardship
4. Clean technology
5. Base of pyramid engagement
6. Regulation anticipation and advocacy
7. Management of “green know-how”
8. Technology co-operation in developing world

Resources
(Valuable, rare, inimitable, non-substitutable)
1. Continuous improvement
Figure 1. 2. Stakeholder integration
The natural environment
3. Reconfiguration for disruptive change
and firm’s resources,
capabilities, and 4. Embedded innovation
competitive advantage 5. Shared vision

This has meant that the social theme is the pressing focus for business’s role in society
in developing countries as opposed to, for example, business ethics, or stakeholder
management. CSR is thus synonymous with corporate sustainability in the developing
world (Visser, 2008, p. 475). This is evidenced in India, for example, where “there is a
strong belief that CSR is an essential element in social uplift and development,
something very relevant to India” (Balasubramanian et al., 2005, p. 86).
In turn this has meant that CSR in developing countries is itself yoked to a variety of
economic multipliers, including but not limited to, the capacity to generate investment
and income, create jobs, invest in human capital, spread international business
standards, produce safe products and services, and build physical and institutional
infrastructure (Nelson, 2003). This is understandable because in India, for example,
even as its corporations have become globally competitive, the country still battles
with issues like high unemployment, income inequality, and lower standards of health,
education, safe drinking water, nutrition, etc., (Arora and Puranik, 2004).
Business therefore has a pragmatic rationale for such an economic focus, given that
it “is negatively affected by poor education, poor health, delinquency, crime, and
unstable regional and national development” (Boyle and Boguslaw, 2007, p. 103). Under
the circumstances the corporate sector will be a key beneficiary of any systemic
solution that can visualise investment in the development and growth of individuals, Corporate
civil societies and nations as a critical necessity (Karnani, 2007). sustainability
Businesses in emerging economies apparently understand the above argument
judging by the available empirical evidence on CSR from the developing world. and strategy
Thus for example in the period just after the millennium, nearly three quarters of
large companies in India, an emerging economy exemplar, presented themselves as
having CSR policies and practices (Chapple and Moon, 2005). 13
The justification for this has come from turn of the millennium business strategy
overhauls that advantaged longer-term business initiatives (Khan and Faisal, 2001)
and supported social responsibility concerns on the part of business (Sankaran, 2003).
This salutary state of CSR appears to be continuing and India, paradoxically, for a
country with the lowest level of gross national product per capita, has the highest level
of CSR among other Asian economies (Reserve Bank of India, 2009).
“Nonetheless”, as Baskin (2006) has argued, “corporate sustainability in emerging
markets, while more extensive than commonly believed, is less embedded in corporate
strategies, less pervasive and less politically rooted than in most high-income OECD
countries” (p. 46). Indian academic, practitioner and institutional commentators concur
that while CSR is being seen as a strategic concern for corporations in India, it has not
been extensively integrated into the daily practices of many of the large Indian
corporations (Balasubramanian et al., 2005, p. 87). They urge that effort is needed to
establish the principles of CSR as part of normal strategy and business operations
(NSE/NIFTY, 2003; Sankaran, 2003). As the experience of transnational corporations
has demonstrated, these exhortations maybe well placed and worth heeding because,
“these companies are in fact deriving strategic value from responsible business
practice [y] even finding that principled behaviour is essential to business survival
and success” (Hall, 2007, p. 31).

Conclusion
The need to develop and hone sustainability-related resources and capabilities as the
basis of strategic competitive advantage is critical. Absent this capability “the natural
environment could create a serious constraint on firms’ attempts to create sustainable
advantage” (Hart and Dowell, 2011, p. 1465). The presence of these strategic
capabilities will on the other hand help firms to simultaneously improve social and
human welfare, reduce their ecological impact and effectively achieve organisational
objectives (Sharma, 2003). Thus as the immediately preceding commentary on
business in emerging economies has underlined, “society may need to become a key
consideration in business mission and strategy” (Hall, 2007, p. 32).
References
Aragon-Correa, J.A. and Sharma, S. (2003), “A contingent resource-based view of proactive
corporate environmental strategy”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 71-88.
Arora, B. and Puranik, R. (2004), “A review of corporate social responsibility in India”,
Development, Vol. 47 No. 3, pp. 93-100.
Balasubramanian, N.K., Kimber, D. and Siemensma, F. (2005), “Emerging opportunities or
traditions reinforced? An analysis of the attitudes towards CSR, and trends of thinking
about CSR, in India”, The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Vol. 17 (Spring), pp. 79-93.
Banerjee, S.B. (2001), “Corporate citizenship and indigenous stakeholders: exploring a new
dynamic of organizational stakeholder relationships”, Journal of Corporate Citizenship,
Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 39-55.
WJEMSD Barge, K.J. and Oliver, C. (2003), “Working with appreciation in managerial practice”, The
Academy of Management Review, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 124-42.
8,1
Barney, J.B. (1991), “Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage”, Journal of
Management, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 99-120.
Barney, J.B. (2001), “Resource-based theories of competitive advantage: a ten-year retrospective
on the resource-based view”, Journal of Management, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 643-51.
14 Baskin, J. (2006), “Corporate responsibility in emerging markets”, Journal of Corporate
Citizenship, Vol. 24 (Winter), pp. 29-47.
Bent, D. and Draper, S. (2007), “Profitable today, sustainable tomorrow”, available at: http://
businessinnovationfacility.org/forum/topics/leader-business-strategies (accessed 20
January 2011).
Benyus, J.M. and Baumeister, D. (2002), “Packaging tips from the porcupine fish (and other wild
packagers)”, Whole Earth, Vol. 110 (Winter), pp. 26-9.
Blowfield, M. (2005), “Corporate social responsibility: reinventing the meaning of development?”,
International Affairs, Vol. 81 No. 3, pp. 515-24.
Boyle, M. and Boguslaw, J. (2007), “Business, poverty and corporate citizenship: naming the issues
and framing solutions”, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Vol. 26 (Summer), pp. 101-20.
Brundtland, G.H. (1987), “Report of the world commission on environment and development: our
future”, OpenElement, available at: http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N87/184/
67/IMG/N8718467.pdf? (accessed 23 September 2008).
Chapple, W. and Moon, J. (2005), “Corporate social responsibility in Asia: a seven country study
of CSR web site reporting”, Business and Society, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 415-41.
Christensen, C.R., Andrews, K.R., Bower, J.L., Hammermesh, G. and Porter, M.E. (1982), Business
Policy: Text and Cases, 5th ed., Irwin, Homewood, IL.
Commission on the Private Sector Development (2004), Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making
Business Work for the Poor, United Nation, New York, NY.
Costanza, R., Daly, H.E. and Bartholomew, J.A. (1991), “Goals, agenda and policy
recommendations for ecological economics”, in Costanza, R. (Ed.), Ecological Economics:
The Science and Management of Sustainability, Columbia University Press, New York, NY,
pp. 1-20.
Crews, D.E. (2010), “Strategies for implementing sustainability: five leadership challenges”,
S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal, Vol. 75 No. 2, pp. 15-22.
Crutzen, P.J. (2009), “Can we survive the ‘anthropocene’ period?”, available at: www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/crutzen1/English (accessed 16 January 2012).
de Ferranti, D. (2006), “Innovative financing options and the fight against global poverty: what’s
new and what next?”, in Brainard, L. (Ed.), Transforming the Development Landscape,
Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, pp. 1-16.
Dierickx, I. and Cool, K. (1989), “Asset stock accumulation and sustainable competitive
advantage”, Management Science, Vol. 35 No. 12, pp. 1504-11.
Donaldson, T. and Dunfee, T.W. (1999), Ties that Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business
Ethics, Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, MA.
Dyllick, T. and Hockerts, K. (2002), “Beyond the business case for corporate sustainability”,
Business Strategy and the Environment, Vol. 11 No. 2, p. 130-41.
Elkington, J. (1998), Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business
(The Conscientious Commerce Series), New Society Publishers, Vancouver, BC.
Faber, N., Jorna, R. and van Engelen, J. (2005), “The sustainability of ‘sustainability’ – a study into
the conceptual foundations of the notion of ‘sustainability’”, Journal of Environmental
Assessment Policy and Management, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 1-33.
Frankel, C. (1998), In Earth’s Company, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC. Corporate
Gladwin, T. (1992), “The meaning of greening: a plea for organisational theory”, in Fischer, K. sustainability
and Schot, J. (Eds), Environmental Strategies for Industry, Island Press, Washington, DC,
pp. 37-62. and strategy
Gladwin, T.N., Kennelly, J.J. and Krause, T. (1995), “Shifting paradigms for sustainable
development: implications for management theory and research”, The Academy of
Management Review, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 874-907. 15
Hall, C. (2007), “Are emerging-market TNCs sensitive to corporate responsibility issues?”,
Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Vol. 26 (Summer), pp. 30-6.
Hart, S.L. (1995), “A natural-resource-based view of the firm”, Academy of Management Review,
Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 986-1014.
Hart, S.L. and Dowell, G. (2011), “A natural resource-based view of the firm: fifteen years later”,
Journal of Management, Vol. 37 No. 5, pp. 1464-79.
Hawken, P. (1993), The Ecology of Commerce, Harper Collins, New York, NY.
Hoffman, A.J. (2007), “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu”, Harvard Business Review,
Vol. 84 No. 10, pp. 34-5.
Howard-Grenville, J.A. (2006), “Inside the ‘black box’: how organisation culture and subcultures
inform interpretations and actions on environmental issues”, Organisation &
Environment, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 46-73.
Jones, G. and Kramer, R. (2010), “CSR and the building of leadership capability”, Journal of Global
Responsibility, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 250-9.
Karnani, A. (2007), “The mirage of marketing to the bottom of the pyramid: how the
private sector can help alleviate poverty”, California Management Review, Vol. 49 No. 4,
pp. 90-111.
Khan, M.N. and Faisal, M.N. (2001), “Mobile commerce: the next dimension”, IIMB Management
Review, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 7-18.
Kleiner, A. (1991), “What does it mean to be green?”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 69 No. 5, pp. 38-47.
Korten, D.C. (2001), When Corporations Rule the World, 2nd ed., Berrett Koehler, San Francisco,
CA.
Linnenluecke, M.K. and Griffiths, A. (2010), “Corporate sustainability and organisational
culture”, Journal of World Business, Vol. 45 No. 4, pp. 357-66.
Lovins, A.B., Lovins, L.H. and Hawken, P. (2007), “A road map for natural capitalism”, Harvard
Business Review, Vol. 85 Nos 7/8, pp. 172-83.
Lubin, D.A. and Esty, D.C. (2010), “The sustainability imperative”, Harvard Business Review,
Vol. 88 No. 5, pp. 42-50.
McDonough, W. (2005), “Ecology, ethics and the making of things”, Sojourners Magazine,
Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. 36-8.
McDonough, W. (2009), “Key note address: business as an agent of world benefit”, available at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v¼DogArXwGWlI (accessed 10 January 2010).
McDonough, W., Braungart, M., Anastas, P.T. and Zimmerman, J.B. (2003), “Applying the
principles of green engineering to cradle-to-cradle design”, Environmental Science and
Technology, Vol. 37 No. 23, pp. 434-41.
McWilliams, A. and Siegel, D. (2011), “Creating and capturing value: strategic corporate social
responsibility, resource based theory, and sustainable competitive advantage”, Journal of
Management, Vol. 37 No. 5, pp. 1480-95.
Malthus, T.R. (1798/2004), An Essay on the Principle of Population, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
WJEMSD Meadows, D.H. and Meadows, D. (2007), “The history and conclusions of The Limits to Growth”,
System Dynamics Review, Vol. 23 Nos 2/3, pp. 191-7.
8,1
Murthy, V. (2009), “Managing businesses in uncertain times: sustainable development
and an ensemble leadership repertoire”, in Hossain, M. and Selvanathan, E. (Eds),
Climate Change and Growth in Asia, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham,
pp. 195-213.
16 Murthy, V. and McKie, D. (2009), Please Don’t Stop the Music: An Ensemble Leadership
Repertoire, Productive Sustainability, and Strategic Innovation for Uncertain Times,
Inderscience, London.
Nelson, J. (2003), Economic Multipliers: Revisiting the Core Responsibility and Contribution of
Business to Development, International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF), London.
Nidumolu, R., Prahalad, C.K. and Rangaswami, M.R. (2009), “Why sustainability is now the key
driver of innovation”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 87 No. 9, pp. 56-64.
NSE/NIFTY (2003), Proposal 84: Corporate Social Responsibility of Nse Nifty Companies,
Content, Implementation Strategies, and Impact, NSE Research Papers National Stock
Exchange, Mumbai.
Porritt, J. (2006), Capitalism as if the World Matters, Earthscan, London.
Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M.R. (2006), “Strategy and society: the link between competitive
advantage and corporate social responsibility”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 84 No. 12,
pp. 78-92.
Porter, M.E. and Reinhardt, F.L. (2007), “A strategic approach to climate”, Harvard Business
Review, Vol. 85 No. 10, pp. 22-4.
Prahalad, C.K. and Hamel, G. (1990), “The core competence of the corporation”, Harvard Business
Review, Vol. 68 No. 3, pp. 79-91.
Prahalad, C.K. and Hart, S.L. (2002), “The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”,
Strategy þ Business, Vol. 26 (First Quarter), pp. 54-67.
Reserve Bank of India (2009), “Monthly bulletin, table 44: foreign exchange reserves”, available
at: http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/Bulletin/PDFs/89876.pdf (accessed 3 January 2011).
Rudd, K. (2008), “Leadership for long term sustainability: the roles of government, business
and the international community, address to the national business leaders forum
on sustainable development, Parliament House, Canberra, 19 May 2008”, available at:
www.pm.gov.au/media/Speech/2008/speech_0253.cfm (accessed 22 September 2008).
Sachs, J.D. (2008), “A user’s guide to this century”, The National Interest, Vol. 96 ( July/August),
pp. 8-14.
Sachs, J. (2010), “Globalisation in the era of environmental crisis”, International Trade Forum,
Vol. 1 pp. 7-10.
Sankaran, K. (2003), “Imperatives of a civil corporation in the new economy”, IIMB Management
Review, (December), pp. 82-8.
Schmidheiny, S. (2006), “A view of corporate citizenship in Latin America”, Journal of Corporate
Citizenship, Vol. 21 (Spring), pp. 21-4.
Selznick, P. (1957), Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, Peterson,
Evanston, IL.
Sharma, S. (2003), “Research in corporate sustainability: what really matters?”, in Sharma, S. and
Starik, M. (Eds), Research in Corporate Sustainability: The Evolving Theory and Practice of
Organisations in the Natural Environment, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 1-29.
Shrivastava, P. (1995), “The role of corporations in achieving ecological sustainability”, The
Academy of Management Review, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 936-61.
Siegel, D.S. (2009), “Green management matters only of it yields more green: an economic/ Corporate
strategic perspective”, Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 5-16.
sustainability
Teece, D.J., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A. (1997), “Dynamic capabilities and strategic management”,
Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 18 No. 7, pp. 509-34. and strategy
United Nations (2006), Millennium Development Goals Report 2006, United Nations,
Brussels.
van Marrewijk, M. (2003), “Concepts and definitions of CSR and corporate sustainability: 17
between agency and communion”, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 44 Nos 2-3, pp. 95-105.
Visser, W. (2008), “Corporate social responsibility in developing countries”, in Crane, A.,
McWilliams, A., Matten, D., Moon, J. and Siegel, D. (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of
Corporate Social Responsibility, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 473-9.
WCED (1987), Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Wernerfelt, B. (1984), “A resource-based view of the firm”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 5
No. 2, pp. 171-80.
Wilkinson, L. (2009), “How to build scenarios”, available at: www.wired.com/wired/scenarios/
build.html (accessed 16 January 2012).
World Bank (2006), World Development Report 2007: Development and the Next Generation,
World Bank, Washington, DC.
World Economic Forum (WEF) (2011), “Global risks 2011 (6th edn.): an initiative of the risk
response network”, available at: http://riskreport.weforum.org/ (accessed 17 January 2012).
World Economic Forum (WEF) (2012), “Global risks 2012 (7th edn.): an initiative of the risk
response network”, available at: www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_
2012.pdf (accessed 16 January 2012).

About the author

Vikram P. Murthy is Director of the Academy for Collaborative Futures, Sydney and Auckland,
which researches adaptive and anticipatory leadership repertoires for prevailing business
challenges. He is on the international Advisory Board of the World Association for Sustainable
Development. He has also been an Adjunct Associate Professor of AUT University, Auckland,
and a Senior Fellow of the Waikato University in New Zealand. He has 30 years of ownership,
board, senior management, and consultancy experience in the hi-tech, retail, and not-for-profit
community sectors globally. Vikram P. Murthy can be contacted at: vikram@academy-
collaborative-futures.org

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected]

Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints