The article explores sustainability from a normative perspective to determine the legitimate uses of the concept in general and in business practices in particular. It is evident that when sustainability is used as an instrumental bluff to maximize profits, it is being diverted from its main objective: intergenerational and environmental justice. To avoid that trap, most of the justifications in favor of sustainable business adopt a structure based on the idea that sustainability conceived as a particular policy can bring benefits to society and to businesses. Strategic management based on stakeholder theory appears often as a pertinent solution to this problem: considering future generations as valid stakeholders would allow to integrate sustainability into the calculation. But stakeholder capitalism defends a pragmatist view that erases the
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.