The political bottom line: the emerging dimension to corporate responsibility for sustainable development

Abstract

This paper explores the idea that businesses are being moved to proactively manage their political activities and influence in relation to their often-expressed responsibility for promoting sustainable development, which we define as managing the 'political bottom line'. We argue that three key drivers account for this shift: first, the growing criticism of voluntary corporate responsibility initiatives; second, the increasing awareness and targeting of corporate political activities, and third, a realization among certain corporate executives and financiers that, without changes to public policies, an individual company's own voluntary responsibility may not deliver sufficient commercial returns. We describe several initiatives on public policy dimensions of sustainable development, which indicate that some companies are beginning to manage their political power in light of societal concerns. In conclusion, we discuss the potential and limits of a 'political bottom line' concept by critiquing the mainstream triple bottom line discourse

New sustainable business models in China

“…In short, Nordic business people explained their reported sustainable business successes in terms of consensus-societies, social equity and love of nature (private communication). This emphasis on personal values suggests that Bendell and Kearins (2005) are missing the point with their identifi cation of a 'political bottom line' for corporate sustainable development, as are Schaltegger and Burritt (2006, p. 295) when they write 'the importance of tasks for applied research, development and training, including to conceptualize an acceptable proportionality dynamic in sustainability challenges to business and to independently research links between this proportionality and the mind sets, actions, attitudes and behaviours of managers, given the predetermined policy goal of a sustainable society'.Even so, it is not surprising that a consortium of Nordic companies meeting to develop new sustainable business models provided a set of steps to integrate sustainable development into existing business models rather than revising the business models per se (see Figure 1). …”

The effect of Dow Jones Sustainability Index on Consumer Sentiment Index

“…To satisfy the specific needs of the investor, DJSI incorporates a number of sub-indexes excluding specific industries that operate, such as tobacco, gambling, armaments, cluster bombs and firearms 3 . As far as DJSI US is concerned, it comprises US sustainability leaders, as according to RobecoSAM approach representing the top 20% of the largest 600 U.S. companies in the Dow Jones Sustainability TM North America 4 .…”

“…Socially responsible firms intend to maximize shareholders' values along with stakeholders' needs. During the last two decades, socially responsible investors tend to invest in companies that incorporate in their business operations social and environmental initiatives towards the concept of sustainable development (Popa, 2014;Bendell and Kearins, 2005). In most of the cases, Socially Responsible Investments (SRI) have attracted the interest as commentary or rival investment to conventional ones (Sirbu et al, 2014).…”

Moving Beyond Profit: Expanding Research to Better Understand Business Environmental Management

“…Few studies explicitly investigate specific barriers to voluntary environmental management, but among available findings, the most frequently reported issues are time, cost, and a lack of perceived benefits to investing in environmental strategies [3,4,9,17,21,32,43,44,46,106,107]. Findings show that such issues may disproportionately affect SMEs because these organizations: (1) have difficulty keeping abreast of regulatory requirements and supporting compliance costs; (2) experience lower consumer demand for environmental improvements; and (3) may lack an organizational network (e.g., trade association) that supports voluntary environmental management [21,94,104,105,108].…”