Cognitive Frames in Corporate Sustainability: Managerial Sensemaking with Paradoxical and Business Case Frames

Abstract

(2014) Cognitive frames in corporate sustainability: managerial sensemaking with paradoxical and business case frames. Academy of Management Review (AMR), 39 (4). pp. This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/63539/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. 1 COGNITIVE FRAMES IN CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY: MANAGERIAL SENSEMAKING WITH PARADOXICAL AND BUSINESS CASE FRAMES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSWe would like to thank Associate Editor Peer Fiss for his strong guidance throughout the review process, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their most constructive feedback and suggestions. 2 ABSTRACTCorporate sustainability confronts managers with complex issues and tensions between economic, environmental and social aspects. Drawing on the literature on managerial cognition, corporate sustainability, and strategic paradoxes, we develop a cognitive framing perspective on corporate sustainability. We propose two cognitive frames -a business case frame and a paradoxical frame -and explore how differences between them in cognitive content and structure influence the three stages of the sensemaking process, i.e. managerial

Quo vadis, paradox? Centripetal and centrifugal forces in theory development

“…1 The accumulating research has advanced scholarly work on key strategic issues, such as the relationship between control and collaboration (Gebert, Boerner, and Kearney, 2010;Sundaramurthy and Lewis, 2003), exploration and exploitation (Andriopoulos and Lewis, 2009;Raisch et al, 2009), and firms' social and financial missions (Hahn et al, 2014;Jay, 2013). As organizations face ever greater technological change, 1 The rapid growth of paradox scholarship was documented in two recent review papers in the Academy of Management Annals: Through a key word search for contradictions, dialectics, and paradox, Putnam and colleagues (2016) found 852 papers published between 1975 and 2015.…”

On the Role of Faith in Sustainability Management: A Conceptual Model and Research Agenda

“…Implicit in this quest for a new 'management' paradigm is the idea that individuals ought to develop new forms of faiths that are distinctively more attuned to the promotion of sustainability principles and practices and in which economic prerogatives are 'one' element of strategising, not 'the' strategic priority. As mentioned in the introduction, sustainability confronts managers with situations in which they need to address multiple desirable but potentially conflicting economic, environmental and social outcomes at various levels of strategy formation (Hahn et al 2014). Gladwin et al (1995) argue that such a challenging goal for corporate sustainability demands a widening of the scope of human choices to promote inclusiveness, connectivity, equity, prudence and security.…”

“…Recent research on the psychological factors that determine a firm's strategic response to sustainability has essentially attended to the role of managerial cognition (Hahn et al 2014(Hahn et al , 2015. Arguments relating to this research stream consider how corporate managers subjectively interpret their environments (Nadkarni and Barr 2008), and how they act to influence the development of collective capabilities, filters, logics, maps, and structures which shape the strategy of the firm (Healey et al 2015;Helfat and Peteraf 2015).…”

“…Arguments relating to this research stream consider how corporate managers subjectively interpret their environments (Nadkarni and Barr 2008), and how they act to influence the development of collective capabilities, filters, logics, maps, and structures which shape the strategy of the firm (Healey et al 2015;Helfat and Peteraf 2015). One recurring claim is that individuals invariably attempt to adapt and align their decisional behaviours to fit into a specific social contextas in the case of the combined pursuit of business sense and sustainable performance through business case and paradoxical cognitive frames (Hahn et al 2014). The idea of sustainability management by adaptation and alignment is essentially grounded in cognitive economic theories.…”

Do Entrepreneurial SMEs Perform Better Because They are More Responsible?

“…Second, this imprecision causes problems for those attempting to measure SD (e.g., Baden and Harwood 2013; Bos-Brouwers 2010). As mentioned above, the methods for evaluating CSR practices vary widely and illustrate the paradoxical tensions between the different aspects of SD and stakeholders' expectations (de Colle et al 2014;Hahn et al 2014Hahn et al , 2015. Studies on the subject are thus often limited to the environmental aspect, setting aside the social aspects.…”