Despite decades of growing attention to sustainability, business efforts remain systemically insufficient in addressing ecological degradation and social harm. This thesis asks why. Rather than treating sustainability as an ambiguous ideal, attention is shifted to unsustainability as what can be observed and explained: the ongoing reproduction of harmful systemic outcomes. Companies are understood as embedded in wider economic, institutional, social, and biophysical systems rather than as isolated actors. Drawing on four studies in sustainable business model research and sustainable service research, the thesis develops a relational conceptualization of unsustainability from a company perspective. On this basis, it identifies five systemic mechanisms that generate and reproduce unsustainability: unsustainable paradigm, multipolar traps, destructive competition, narrow boundary perspectives, and information and feedback gaps. Using systems thinking from a company perspective, the thesis explains why sustainability efforts may remain insufficient even when they are well intended. It offers a framework for understanding how company activity relates to wider system conditions and what must be addressed for more meaningful change to occur.
Sustainable development has traditionally been understood as a framework balancing environmental, economic and social objectives. However, accelerating climate change, geopolitical instability, technological disruption and growing systemic risks challenge the conditions under which these objectives can be achieved. Despite expanding research on sustainability, resilience and security, their interrelationships remain fragmented across disciplinary perspectives. This article examines how the relationship between sustainable development and security has evolved and analyzes how existing discussions on sustainable security can be brought together into a more coherent analytical framework. The study applies qualitative document analysis, comparative analysis, thematic analysis and analytical synthesis of the academic literature, international policy documents and institutional reports. The analysis indicates that progress towards sustainable development depends to a substantial extent on the resilience of environmental, economic, societal and institutional systems. Rather than representing a separate policy field, sustainable security provides an integrative perspective that explains how these dimensions interact under conditions of systemic uncertainty. Building on existing research in sustainability, security, resilience and governance, the article develops an Integrated Sustainable Security Framework that brings these dimensions into a single analytical structure suitable for examining their mutual relationships. Its main contribution lies in integrating existing perspectives into an analytically consistent framework that may support future empirical and interdisciplinary research on the sustainability–security nexus.
Radoslav Ivančík, Jiří Dušek· Sustainability· 0 citations
Sustainability has become a mission critical goal for organizations, especially in the context of supply chains where data on the environment are important in the management of carbon emissions, resources and regulatory compliance. While more and more companies have access to environmental information and more and more ESG reporting frameworks, it's hard for many companies to translate sustainability information into concrete actions. This gap indicates that other than data availability, other factors might influence decision making towards sustainable development. This research aims at understanding how cognitive biases, organizational pressure and the problem of information overload affect sustainable decision-making of supply chain practitioners. The study has been targeted towards employees from Malaysia's Manufacturing & Logistics industry. Data will be gathered from 384 respondents, who have relevant experience in SC decision making and have access to environmental information, using purposive sampling. This research aims to determine if there is a gap between the maximum possible and actual use of environmental information for supply chain decision-making purposes due to other limitations such as psychological and organizational factors. The findings make an impact on the sustainability and supply chain management literature as they provide insights into the obstacles facing firms to translate environmental knowledge into sustainable actions. The findings could help organisations and policymakers create more robust decision-support systems and sustainability initiatives to improve performance in the long run of their supply chains.
Nurhanan Syafiah Abdul Razak, Wesam Al Madhoun, Tasya Aspiranti· Veredas do Direito· 0 citations
Corporate sustainability research is rich but fragmented where influential frameworks illuminate important aspects of sustainability dynamics, yet they are often used in parallel rather than connected through a shared explanatory logic of change. This paper addresses that corporate sustainability puzzle through a targeted literature review and critical synthesis of a 44‐source clean‐fit subset within a bounded conceptual corpus of 114 contributions organised into five approach families: responsibility taxonomies, strategy‐oriented lenses, maturity and stage models, process‐change perspectives and paradox/tension perspectives. Across these families, this study found that motives are often treated as separable rather than interacting, engagement is more often progressive than reversible, outcomes are under‐specified or weakly integrated and time and context are acknowledged more readily than embedded in the framework's change logic. Building on these findings, the study develops the dynamic sustainability system (DSS), a five‐dimensional, feedback‐driven conceptual architecture linking concurrent and interacting motives, reversible engagement, dual outcome reservoirs, explicit time horizons and internal and external conditioning contexts. The DSS explains how acceleration, plateauing and reversal may emerge in corporate sustainability trajectories and offers a more disciplined basis for longitudinal analysis, future empirical testing and context‐sensitive diagnostic interpretation by scholars, managers and policy actors.
Omaima A. G. Hassan· Business Strategy and the En...· 0 citations
The measurability of sustainability is a subject of ongoing debate. Discretion is an important antecedent to such valuation yet remains largely unaddressed. Thus, we conduct a cross‐case study of four organizations, finding differences between product and service firms in how they define their sustainability discretion, which is shaped by and, in turn, shapes different opportunity narratives. We furthermore find differences in how firms in strongly versus weakly regulated contexts exercise discretion for sustainability, which is shaped by and, in turn, shapes different consequentiality narratives. This paper advances prior research by conceptualizing discretion making as an antecedent to the valuation of sustainability. Furthermore, we show that the (de)legitimation of sustainability strategies occurs not only during implementation but also during the phase of discretion making. Third, we offer a more nuanced perspective on business‐as‐usual versus disruptive approaches to sustainability, highlighting the crucial role of how firms “make” their discretion scope in different regulatory contexts.
Annabelle Müller· Business Strategy and the En...· 0 citations
The sustainability of buildings and the built environment extends beyond energy and environmental performance to circular resource use, health and safety, digital infrastructure, and stakeholder collaboration. This exploratory integrative literature review examines how these established but insufficiently connected domains reshape business models in the built environment. Since the built environment is a major source of global carbon emissions and waste, a primary research stream concerns the transition toward circular economy principles beyond traditional profit-maximization logics. The literature also highlights the potential of health- and safety-oriented innovations to reduce risks and improve indoor environments. Other studies highlight the potential of digital innovations to improve life-cycle management, resource efficiency, and risk mitigation. However, their widespread adoption faces systemic barriers, including data interoperability and cybersecurity issues, implementation costs, skills shortages, organizational resistance, and regulatory and governance challenges. The literature often emphasizes technical potential while paying less attention to value-capture mechanisms and the allocation of costs, risks, benefits, and responsibilities among the actors involved. Integrating sustainable practices, digital infrastructures, circular-economy principles, and collaborative governance is therefore essential to develop economically viable, organizationally feasible, and ethically responsible business models for the built environment, across the building life cycle and among public and private stakeholders.
P. Bonifaci, Armand Vokshi, Siarhei Manzhynski et al.· Buildings· 0 citations
Current scientific literature lacks a comprehensive theoretical explanation of how corporate environmental responsibility (CER) translates into sustainability in the context of digital business transformation (DBT). The aim of this study is to develop and substantiate a conceptual model of this mechanism. The methodological framework includes a systemic and comparative analysis, a synthesis of stakeholder theories, the resource-based view, signaling theory, and Porter’s hypothesis, as well as an analysis of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE) ESG index data for 2014–2023. The proposed model identifies four interconnected channels for transforming environmental practices into sustainability: financial and investment, operational efficiency, reputational and market, and innovation and strategic. It is substantiated that DBT acts not as an external factor, but as an integrating environment that enhances synergy between channels and makes the mechanism self-sustaining. Four management principles are formulated and a threelevel system of methodological recommendations (process, factor, and dynamic levels) is developed, enabling companies to systematically improve the return on environmental investments. The model’s applicability to Russian practice is demonstrated: leading companies in the RUIE ESG indices implement precisely the combination of channels defined in the model. The key conclusion of the article is that CER does not translate into sustainability in isolation, but through channel synergy, catalyzed by DBT, which requires companies to reconsider their planning horizons and management tools.
J. Zhang· Vestnik of Samara State Univ...· 0 citations
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