Introduction

Abstract

Corporate sustainability, including corporate social responsibility (e.g., Bansal, 2005), is among the hot topics of the 21^st century, both in academic research (Paton & Siegel, 2005) and in public media and managerial practice (Dawkins, 2004; McKinsey, 2007). It has become an omnipresent phenomenon on the European and North American political and economic landscape (Doh & Guay, 2006), indicated by agreements like the ‘Kyoto Protocol’ made in 1997 and the Paris ‘Climate Change 2007’ protocol, as well as by popular events like the foundation of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in 1995, Al Gore's climate project ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006, Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu's appointment as Secretary of Energy in the United States by President Obama, and the growing popularity of organisations’ corporate social responsibility departments and sustainability reports.