Understanding Sustainability Performance in Business Organizations: Implications for the Sustainability Service Industry

This book sheds new light on the role businesses can play in contributing to sustainability objectives, and how governance actors can better encourage their contributions.

Jean-Pierre Imbrogiano introduces and empirically investigates the concept of sustainability performance in businesses, which reveals how achieving social and environmental objectives is experienced within business organizations. He focuses on supply chain management as a key part in this process and looks at how this has evolved to become a vital sector in the global business landscape. He further considers the current practices of governance actors which aim to enable sustainability performance in businesses. Labelled as a ’sustainability service industry’, these actors include international, national, and industry sustainability initiatives, sustainability standard setters, business consultancies and rating agencies, as well as sustainable supply chain managers in corporations. Overall, this book calls for a conceptual reorientation in business sustainability scholarship, and points towards a challenging agenda for change in the sustainability service industry.

Understanding Sustainability Performance in Business Organizations will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable business, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, sustainable supply chain management, and sustainability governance.

Jean-Pierre Imbrogiano is a DAAD PRIME fellow at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, and Laval University, Canada, as well as a visiting scholar to the University of Helsinki, Finland. He gained his PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia, where he conducted his research at the Sustainable Minerals Institute. His research interests lie in businesses’ sustainability performance, the governance of business sustainability, and in socio-cultural foundations of (un-)sustainable development.