Abstract
Organizations will always have room to improve the productivity of resources and so reduce their overall environmental impact. Indeed, in trying to go beyond compliance, firms have increasingly adopted a wide spectrum of social and environmental prerequisites into their strategies and practices. But while most companies are expected to become better citizens, in each industry only a few will be able to transform environmental investments into sources of competitive advantage. As with any other issue in business, environmental management is contingent on the internal capabilities and the context in which firms operate. Considering that sustainability strategies are constituents of the generic corporate strategy, one could then ask: what sustainability strategies are conducive to the creation of competitive advantage or new market spaces?
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Notes
A generic overview of the various schools of strategic management is presented by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel, Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
Forest L. Reinhardt, Down To Earth: Applying Business Principles to Environmental Management (Boston, USA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
See Chapter 4 in Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (New Haven, USA: Yale University Press, 2006); see also Chapter 4 in Reinhardt, op. cit.
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For an overview of the sources of competitive advantage, see: Chapter 2 in Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (London: Free Press, 1985).
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Work on the Resource-Based View of the Firm in strategic management began with the articles of: (i) Birger Wernefelt, “A Resource-Based View of the Firm,” Strategic Management Journal, 5 (1984): 171–180;
(ii) Richard Rumelt, “Toward a Strategic Theory of the Firm,” in Competitive Strategic Management (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prenctice Hall, 1984); and
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A situational review of the Resource-Based View can be found in: Jay Barney and William Hesterly, “Organizational Economics: Understanding the Relationship Between Organizations and Economic Analysis,” in Handbook of Organization Studies, ed. Stewart Clegg, Cynthia Hardy and Walter Nord (London: Sage, 1996): 115–147.
The concept of organizational processes employed here encompasses both the activities of controlling manufacturing, production, or industrial processes, and generic management processes, which relate mainly but are not limited to (bureaucratic) activities performed by the various members of an organization. For an overview of classic organizational processes, see: Richard Hall, Organizations: Structures, Processes, and Outcomes (Upper Saddler River: Prentice Hall, 1999).
This section is based on Renato J. Orsato, “Competitive Environmental Strategies: When Does It Pay to Be Green?” California Management Review, 48/2 (2006): 127–141.
For instance: Pieter Winsemius and Ulrich Guntran, A Thousand Shades of Green: Sustainable Strategies for Competitive Advantage (London: Earthscan, 2002);
Bob Williard, The Sustainability Advantage: Seven Business Case Benefits of a Triple Bottom Line (Gabriola Island, Columbia, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2002);
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution (London: Earthscan, 1999).
For an overview of Voluntary Agreements and how they may influence a firm’s competitiveness, see: Magali Delmas and Ann K. Terlaak, “A Framework for Analyzing Environmental Voluntary Agreements,” California Management Review, 43/3 (2001): 44–61.
Such as those presented by Stewart Hart, “Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World,” Harvard Business Review, 75/1 (1997): 66–76; and
Dexter Dunphy and Andrew Griffiths, Sustainable Corporation: Organizational Renewal in Australia (Frenchs Forest, Australia: Allen & Urwin, 1998), among others.
Christopher B. Hunt and Ellen R. Auster, “Proactive Environmental Management: Avoiding the Toxic Trap,” Sloan Management Review, 31/2 (1990): 7–19.
Stuart L. Hart, Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity, 2nd ed. (Wharton, Pennsylvania: Wharton School Publishing, 2007).
Charles Corbett and David Kirsh, “ISO 14000: an agnostic’s report from the front line,” ISO 9000 + ISO 14000 News 2 (2000): 4–17.
Richard Florida and Derek Davidson, “Gaining from Green Management: Environmental Management Systems Inside and Outside the Factory,” California Management Review, 43/3 (2001): 64–85.
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© 2009 Renato J. Orsato
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Orsato, R.J. (2009). What are Sustainability Strategies?. In: Sustainability Strategies. INSEAD Business Press Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236851_2
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