Converging sustainability definitions: industry independent dimensions

Published date13 July 2015
Date13 July 2015
Pages206-232
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/WJSTSD-04-2015-0017
AuthorLijo John,Gopalakrishnan Narayanamurthy
Subject MatterPublic policy & environmental management,Environmental technology & innovation
Converging sustainability
definitions: industry independent
dimensions
Lijo John and Gopalakrishnan Narayanamurthy
Department of Quantitative Methods and Operations Management,
Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIMK), Kerala, India
Abstract
Purpose Sustainability as a construct is still debated and is yet to attain a consensus among
researchers and practitioners. Sustainable development has been seen differently by players from
different industry sectors. There is need to understand the commonality prevailing on sustainability
practices across different industry sectors to arrive at a consensual sustainability definition.
The purpose of this paper is to propose four dimensions of sustainability and studies how it captures
sustainability practices across key industrial sectors.
Design/methodology/approach Current study argues the case for sustainability using four
constructs, namely, economical, environmental, ethical, and social. Subsequently a holistic definition
with a model is proposed incorporating the four constructs for sustainability. Studies documenting
sustainability practices across industries, namely, automobile, infrastructure, cement and concrete,
electronics, mining, paper, pharmaceutical, and logistics were reviewed to validate the applicability
of the proposed four construct model across different key industrial sectors.
Findings Current study validates the industry independence of the proposed four constructs
of sustainability model through a literature review. Very few studies have documented
industry-specific sustainability practices and much lesser have studied the ethical dimension of
sustainability. Furthermore, the organizational strategic plan is developed for incorporating the
environmental, economical, ethical, and social needs into the organizational business operations
at the strategic, tactical, and the operational levels.
Research limitations/implications Proposed model needs to be applied in multiple case
organizations from diverse sectors to evaluate its capacity to capture the aspects of sustainability
across different sectors. Future study could attempt to understand the interrelationships between the
identified constructs and how they impact each other within different industrial sectors.
Practical implications Model linked to organizational business operationsat the strategic, tactical,
and the operational levels helps in the alignment of the organizational activity towards the strategic
intent of the organizational sustainabilityphilosophy in the business ecology. It alsohelps in equipping
the organizationto achieve the operationalexcellence and the strategicbusiness growth at the same time.
Originality/value Current study is unique in its attempt to understand the capability of proposed
sustainability dimensions to capture the sustainability practices followed across different industrial sectors.
Keywords Sustainability, Social, Environmental, Economical, Ethical
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Sustainability considered in this study is defined as the complete plan of ethical action
for an organization which is attempting to transform itself into sustainable, i.e.
to become pro-environmental, pro-social, and traditional pro-economic, both internally
within the organization and externally across the supply chain (Zhu and Sarkis, 2006).
Sustainability articles in literature have been maturing for the past two decades
and very rapidly in the past decade (Seuring and Muller, 2008). Sustainability has
taken multiple forms in literature under the terminologies green management
(Molina-Azorín et al., 2009; Alfred and Adam, 2009), green supply chain management
World Journal of Science,
Technology and Sustainable
Development
Vol. 12 No. 3, 2015
pp. 206-232
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2042-5945
DOI 10.1108/WJSTSD-04-2015-0017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2042-5945.htm
206
WJSTSD
12,3
(GSCM) (Sarkis et al., 2011; Srivastava, 2007; Zhu and Sarkis, 2006), green supply chain
(Walton et al., 1998), sustainability (Gunasekaran and Spalanzani, 2012) and sustainable
supply chain management (SSCM) (Seuring and Muller, 2008), etc. Review studies also
exist in literatur e on this topic as listed below:
Srivastava (2007) classified the GSCM literature on the basis of the problem
context, methodology adopted, mathematical tools/techniques used, anda timeline
indicating relevant papers;
Molina-Azorín et al. (2009) considered only the quantitative studies until 2008
which discussed the link between environmental variables and financial
performance;
Sarkis et al. (2011) review and categorized recent GSCM literature under nine
broad organizational theories; and
Gunasekaran and Spalanzani (2012) developed a framework for Sustainable
Business Development (SBD) including tools, techniques and some performance
measures and metrics for SBD.
In literature, sustainability was considered to be one of the key criterion in logistics and
was initially studied under the domain of reverse logistics. In this study, we discuss
sustainability dimensions from reverse-logistics lens as we believe it be one of the
popular and explicitly documented sustainability initiative of an organization. Poist
(1989) divides the evolution of the commercial logistics practice into three eras, namely,
pre-logistics era, the logistics era, and the neo-logistics era. In the pre-logistics era
the central idea was to concentrate on building the transportation facilities for the
industrial products to reach their customers. In logistics era the focus shifted from the
transportation systems to building a more comprehensive logistics system encompassing
the elements of efficiency such as cost reduction, profit maximization, and channel
specification. Neo-logistics era saw an organizational maturity by incorporating the
logistics into the functional enterprise system where the logistics became a constantly
interacting system between the organization and thesociety. Elkington (1997) is credited
with popularizing the latterthree dimensions, whichhe called the triple bottom line(TBL)
principle (also known as the three pillars: profit, planet, and people). As a sign of their
sustainability practices companies issued periodic TBL reports to their stakeholders.
Reverse logistics gained increasing importance as a profitable and sustainable business
strategy. A reverse-logistics system translated itself into a sustainable supply chain
system that has been redesigned to manage the flow of products or parts destined for
remanufacturing, recycling, or disposal and to use resources effectively.
Reverse logistics consists of all logistic activities necessary to unlock the value of
a product through recovery. It consists of collecting discarded goods, inspecting, and
sorting them, followed by some recovery action, which can either be a simple cleaning
or a complex disassembly, and finally a remanufacturing process and a remarketing
of the output (Dekker et al., 2012). The reverse logistics, at the starting, concerned with
the retrieval of products which did not conform to the quality. The Tylenol scare in
1984, where Johnson and Johnson and McNeil Laboratories responded quickly to a lot
of tainted bottles that had to be removed from the shelves and was replaced by
the fresh bottles can be treated as one of the earliest examples of reverse logistics in the
modern business history (Walden, 2005). In less than a decades time the German
Government passed an ordinance where it made mandatory for the manufactures
to retract and recycle the hazardous waste (de Brito and Dekker, 2002). The producers
207
Converging
sustainability
definitions

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