Year: ; Title: Transitions to sustainable development: new directions in the study of long term transformative change; Number of pages: ; Publisher: New .
Table of contents
- Editorial Reviews
- The Next Phase of Business Sustainability
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Surveys show that 88 percent of business school students think that learning about social and environmental issues in business is a priority, and 67 percent want to incorporate environmental sustainability into their future jobs. To meet this demand, the percentage of business schools that require students to take a course dedicated to business and society increased from 34 percent in to 79 percent in , and specific academic programs on business sustainability can now be found in 46 percent of the top US master of business administration MBA programs.
For all this interest, we should expect the world to become more sustainable. But problems such as climate change, water scarcity, species extinction, and many others continue to worsen. Sustainable business is reaching the limits of what it can accomplish in its present form. It is slowing the velocity at which we are approaching a crisis, but we are not changing course. Instead of tinkering around the edges of the market with new products and services, business must now transform it. That is the focus of the next phase of business sustainability, and we can see signs that it is emerging.
Instead of waiting for a market shift to create incentives for sustainable practices, companies are creating those shifts to enable new forms of business sustainability. The first is focused on reducing unsustainability; the second is focused on creating sustainability. The first focuses primarily inward toward the health and vitality of the organization; the second expands that focus to look outward toward the health and vitality of the market and society in which the organization operates. The first is incremental, the second transformational.
Changing the way we do business is essential to addressing the challenges of environmental degradation. The market is the most powerful institution on earth, and business is the most powerful entity within it.
Business transcends national boundaries, and it possesses resources that exceed those of many nation-states. Business is responsible for producing the buildings we live and work in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the automobiles we drive, the energy that propels them, and the next form of mobility that will replace them. This does not mean that only business can generate solutions, but with its unmatched powers of ideation, production, and distribution, business is best positioned to bring the change we need at the scale we need it.
In its first incarnation, business sustainability represents a market shift. Market pressures bring sustainability to business attention through core management channels and functions. This began with Nixon-era government regulation and grew to include insurance companies, investors, consumers, suppliers, buyers, and others through the s and s.
While corporate social responsibility CSR is one response to such pressures, companies have sought to improve competitive positioning by linking sustainability and corporate strategy. This involves translating the issue into the core language of business management: In each case, the firm has an established model that it can use to conceptualize the issue and formulate a response.
Editorial Reviews
In this way, sustainability becomes much like any other business threat, where market expectations change and technological developments advance, leaving certain industries to adapt or face demise while others rise to fill their place. For example, when insurance companies apply sustainability pressures on the firm, the issue becomes one of risk management.
When competitors apply such pressures, it becomes an issue of strategic direction. When investors and banks do so, it becomes an issue of capital acquisition and cost of capital. When suppliers and buyers do so, it becomes an issue of supply-chain logistics. When consumers do so, it becomes an issue of market demand. Framed in such terms, much of the specific language of sustainability recedes and is replaced by standard business logic.
Therefore, companies can remain agnostic about the science of particular issues such as climate change but still recognize their importance as business concerns. The successful company can perform this translation process and integrate sustainability into its existing structures and strategies. Take Whirlpool , for example: It has improved appliance energy efficiency because it has watched energy efficiency move from number 12 in consumer priorities in the s to number three, just behind cost and performance, today.
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Whirlpool and others expect those concerns to continue to grow. Another signal comes from impact investors, who consider environmental, social, and governance ESG factors in their investment criteria.
But it is not just a specialized sector; this past May, financial advisory firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street cast votes in opposition to ExxonMobil management and called for the company to disclose its climate change impacts. These are all signs that the market has shifted and continues to shift. Today, consumers can buy sustainable products, stay in sustainable hotels, eat sustainable foods, and use sustainable cleaning products. While this greening of the market is a good thing, it is not actually solving the root problems it was meant to address.
Our world continues to become less, not more, sustainable. While business sustainability has been going mainstream, the world has witnessed unprecedented human impacts on the natural environment that threaten the viability of life on Earth. While one ozone depletion is on the mend, scientists believe we have overshot the boundaries of three: Further indicators are also blinking red, such as ocean acidification, freshwater use, and deforestation.
The remaining two boundaries—chemical pollution and atmospheric particle pollution—require more data to assess. All of these disruptions are the result of system failures created largely by our market institutions. They will have to be remedied by those institutions.
The Next Phase of Business Sustainability
Fortunately, capitalism can be quite malleable. It is designed by human beings in the service of human beings, and it can evolve to meet the changing needs of human beings. This has happened throughout its history to address issues such as monopoly power, collusion, and price-fixing. Many companies recognize this challenge and are pushing for new market models. Corporate decision makers have a key role to play in facilitating this transition.
For example, to turn around the KPI of climate change, the market must go carbon neutral and eventually go carbon negative. It requires a change in the overall market. Real sustainability is a property of a system. A more sustainable energy system incorporates the whole grid, encompassing generation, transmission, distribution, use, and mobility.
We can already see signals of this change happening as new energy sources, distributed energy, demand-side management, smart appliances, and smart meters are beginning to transform our conceptions of energy.
Already, jobs in the clean energy sector have exceeded those in oil drilling. But the energy renaissance goes further. Electric vehicles have the potential to change the grid, leveling the electricity demand curve by charging at night and providing storage capacity during the day for intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. Already, a Nissan Leaf automobile owner in Japan can buy a transformer to power the house off the battery pack during a power failure.
Research is under way to scale this concept and allow consumers to rent their batteries to utilities while their car is parked. Electric vehicles are also transforming the auto industry. Who could have predicted 20 years ago that new entrants like Tesla would enjoy a larger market capitalization than General Motors? And as the shift to driverless cars continues, IT companies such as Apple and Alphabet have entered the fray, shifting success factors in the auto sector from hardware to software, and with them our conceptions of personal mobility.
For example, as incumbents such as Ford Motor seek to become mobility providers, they must learn to operate like the airline industry, where profits increase when their cars spend minimal time idling. Fewer cars on the road means repurposing unneeded roads, parking lots, garages, and service stations. As we see with the energy and transportation sectors, the potential scope of market transformation is vast. To help flesh this out, we can conceive this sustainability revolution as proceeding from two initial phases. First, corporations rethink their business strategies to play a stronger role in guiding the sustainability of the systems of which they are a part.
Second, the business model itself undergoes reconceptualization. The first phase includes at least four new ways of conceiving their approach to operations, partnerships, government engagement, and transparency. New conceptions of operations Market transformation calls for optimizing supply-chain logistics to reduce risks from numerous factors such as disruptions due to increased storm severity caused by climate change; current and future resource availability and price volatility; accelerating emissions and concerns for public health and the environment; and the future resilience of business and civil society.
These risks can directly affect assets and operations, availability and costs of inputs, regulation of sourcing and distribution, workforce availability and productivity, and stakeholder reputation.
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To better manage such operational systems, companies are moving away from linear models in which items are created, used, and disposed of once they reach their end of serviceable life, and toward circular models, where items are created, used, and then either restored or reprocessed to recover energy or materials that can be used again. This sense of urgency includes an awareness that our entire social system is in need of fundamental transformation. But like the earlier transition between the 's and 's from a pre-modern to a modern industrial society, this second transition is also a contested one.
Sustainable development is only one of many options. This book addresses the issue on how to understand the dynamics and governance of the second transition dynamics in order to ensure sustainable development. It will be necessary reading for students and scholars with an interest in sustainable development and long-term transformative change. Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon. When you click on a Sponsored Product ad, you will be taken to an Amazon detail page where you can learn more about the product and purchase it.
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He is scientific director of the Amsterdam School of Social Science Research ASSR , in which some political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists cooperate in an interdisciplinary research programme. Jan Rotmans is one of the founders of Integrated Assessment IA , and has outstanding experience in IA modeling, scenario-building, uncertainty management and transition management. Dutch Research Institute For Transitions. Johan Schot is professor in social history of technology at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He is a fellow of the N. Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
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