Strategies for Sustainable Development: Organizational Motivations, Stakeholders' Expectations and Sustainability Agendas

Abstract

Society's expectations of business are mounting and stakeholders are asking organizations to become more mindful of their interests. Companies are responding by becoming more involved in the resolution of social-environmental challenges. Their sustainability agendas, however, are often claimed to be ineffective and to lack strategic thinking. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the factors that determine the scope and features of these agendas. Specifically, we investigate organizational objectives (the starting point of any strategy) and the posture towards mountingand sometimes conflictingexpectations. We find that pessimistic judgments about sustainability agenda effectiveness may have been too hasty from both a micro-level and a macro-level standpoint.

Economic sustainability of heritage conservation in Hong Kong: The impact of heritage buildings on adjacent property prices

“…Private owners would have a stronger incentive to make use of the heritage sites to maximize its potential long‐term business returns and would only be willing to invest resources and capital in conservation or revitalization of built heritage for their direct commercial benefits. It has been criticized that some private companies' sustainable development agendas are sometimes ineffective and lack overall strategic thinking (Pinelli & Maiolini, ). In contrast, the government has a more genuine intention in preserving the built heritage for the overall sustainability of the community.…”

The Power Paradox: Implicit and Explicit Power Motives, and the Importance Attached to Prosocial Organizational Goals in SMEs

“…While this is relevant in small businesses in which organizational goals may largely reflect the drivers and preferences of the key decision-maker, our research falls short in examining actual behavior and priorities enacted upon in the firm. For that reason, we encourage further research to focus on the factors that facilitate (or limit) the translation of personal goals into discretionary prosocial practices [31]. Such studies might explain why Gadenne et al [23] find a correlation between environmental awareness and green practices, while Mir and Feitelson [109] fail to find such a significant relationship.…”

“…An important boundary condition in organizational prosocial goal-setting is the key decision-maker's motivation to commit to prosocial goals [31]. Given that this boundary condition is central to this paper, we review the literature on human motives in the entrepreneurship and goal-setting literature in three steps (see Table 1).…”

Social Franchising Model as a Scaling Strategy for ICT Reuse: A Case Study of an International Franchise

“…While early work on scaling focused on how people and policies inside the organization can affect the growth of social impact [23,29], more recent attention has focused on how interaction with their external ecosystems can help the scaling of social entrepreneurial organizations, creating alliances to acquire resources and political support [30,31], building on market incentives to change the behaviours of beneficiaries and influencers, and capitalizing on economic and social trends to attract attention and build momentum for their causes [9,32]. Similarly, Pinelli and Maiolini [33] investigated different perspectives on capabilities, which affect sustainability agendas of organizations. Particularly, as claimed by Pinelli and Maiolini [33], static models identify internal opportunities while developmental models are based on stakeholders' expectations.…”