The business case for sustainability in retrospect: A Scandinavian institutionalism perspective on the role of expert conferences in shaping the emerging “CSR and corporate sustainability space”

• Author: Stefan Schaltegger,Tim Breitbarth,John Mahon
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• Date: 01 August 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1855

SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER

The business case for sustainability in retrospect: A

Scandinavian institutionalism perspective on the role of expert

conferences in shaping the emerging “CSR and corporate

sustainability space”

Tim Breitbarth

1

|Stefan Schaltegger

2

|John Mahon

3

1

TB Advisory, Cologne, Germany

2

Centre for Sustainability Management,

Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg,

Germany

3

Maine Business School, University of Maine,

Orono, Maine

Correspondence

Tim Breitbarth, TB Advisory, Herthastr. 40,

Cologne 50969, Germany.

Email: mail@timbreitbarth.com

This paper is concerned with the rise and, in retrospect, successful “positioning”of

corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate sustainability as a management

idea. It answers to calls that more research is required into the “business case for sus-

tainability,”especially the link between rhetoric and reality. We allow for a narrative‐

driven and dynamic perspective to frame the analysis of the discourse, rhetoric, and

arguments in use during the emergence of “modern CSR”in Europe in the early

2000s. On the one hand, it shows that the European Union/Commission acted as

an “enabler”of business case rhetoric. On the other hand, empirical evidence from

two expert conferences series in Germany 2004–2008 leads to the conclusion that

a wide coalition of interested parties continuously and progressively filled, shaped,

and energized the early “CSR and corporate sustainability space”with presenting

CSR as a rationale and progressive (management) idea.

1|INTRODUCTION

The role business in general and modern corporations in particular

play in society have been a topic of debate for more than a century

with scholars having observed several shifts in the discourse of means

and ends in general and academic research agendas in particular

(Preston, 1990; Carroll & Buchholtz, 2006; Carroll, 2012; Wang &

Gao 2016; Wang, Tong, Takeuchi, & George, 2016). The pressure on

companies from various publics and stakeholders to explicitly declare

their intentions and commitment to more socially responsible and

sustainable corporate practice and the expectations to fulfill it every

day and everywhere is a clear sign that corporate social responsibility

(CSR) dynamics have been an increasingly, ongoing challenge for

practitioners, policy makers, and researchers since the dawn of the

21st century.

In 2002, Wolff (in Matten & Moon, 2005, p. 335) proclaimed that

“CSR is an idea whose time has come,”which at the time in Europe

started to get manifested by how the European Union embraced the

concept for strategic reasons. Already, various authors saw develop-

ments beyond CSR (e.g., Schaltegger & Burritt, 2005; van Marrewijk,

2003), eventually including the societal expectation that companies

contribute substantially to solving planetary ecological problems and

to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Schaltegger,

Beckmann, & Hockerts, 2018a, 2018b) and sustainability transforma-

tions of markets, consumption patterns, and lifestyles. Management

research and practice is based on ideas that shape corporate behavior

(Engwall & Pahlberg, 2001; Sahlin‐Andersson & Engwall, 2002). Such

ideas can translate into influential paradigms (see,e.g., Kuhn, 1970),

which are models for thinking—based on values, beliefs, and

methods—that are created and shared: “It's a way we see the world

—not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving,

understanding, interpreting”(Covey, in Clarke & Clegg, 2000, p. 46).

In this contribution, we seek to discover early discourses and attri-

butes that have led to the successful positioning of “modern”CSR and

corporate sustainability as a business necessity despite continuing

challenges and criticism: “What does it mean?”(Sethi, 1975); “Is it

legitimate?”(Friedman, 1990); “Is it just an image polishing PR inven-

tion?”(Frankental, 2001); “Is it a management fashion?”(Beckmann,

Morsing, & Reisch, 2006). In a 2012 keynote, “A Corporate Social

Responsibility Journey: Looking Back, Looking Forward”Archie Carroll

(2012, no page numbers) said, “Even today, an explosion of research

striving to document the ‘business case’for CSR has become popular

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1855

J Public Affairs. 2018;18:e1855.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1855

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of16

(…) We go to great lengths to assure our business community

colleagues that CSR is valuable for more reasons than just that it is

the right thing to do—that is, it has a bottom line impact as well.”Also,

we answer to calls that more research is required into the “business

case for sustainability,”especially the link between rhetoric and reality

(Lee, 2012).

In the second decade of the new millennium, the constructive and

contingent nature of the “business case”for CSR and sustainability has

attracted more attention (Breitbarth, 2011; Hockerts, 2014; Milne &

Gray, 2013; Pedersen, Rosati, Lauesen, & Farsang, 2017; Schaltegger

et al., 2018a, 2018b; Schaltegger & Burritt, 2018). This may constitute

a reflection on the nature of past and still current CSR research that is

being criticized for focusing on inventories rather than dynamics (Basu

& Palazzo, 2008), whereas the focus on transformation of markets and

society has more recently become a key issue of corporate sustainabil-

ity research. Hence, particular interest of this contribution lies on giving

historical evidence to the development of a business case for CSR and

sustainability, not in the sense whether it exists or not, but how busi-

ness case rhetoric and reality were interrelated aspects of the early

CSR space and, until today, relevant in the framing and development

of scientific and practice fields of corporate sustainability. We are

guided by a mind‐set asking how and what CSR “is becoming”and

how and why the link between CSR, sustainability, and competitiveness

has made the topic a more appealing management idea altogether.

At the start of the new millennium, the debate about CSR was

being perceived as highly fragmented because of its intangibility, con-

text dependency, and normative dimension (McIntosh, 2003), and CSR

itself was a contestable cluster concept overlapping business ethics,

corporate philanthropy, corporate citizenship, sustainability, and envi-

ronmental responsibility (Matten & Moon, 2005). There was critique

amongst scholars and practitioners about the usefulness and appropri-

ateness of general CSR definitions (e.g., van Marrewijk, 2003).

Although it was generally noted that all definitions of CSR have limita-

tions (Carroll & Buchholtz, 2006), it seemed to lead to perplexity and

helplessness amongst scholars who were longing for singular meaning:

We remember Votaw's (1972, p. 25) dated notion that CSR “means

something, but not always the same to everybody”being often

referred to with a somewhat dismissive connotation. Complexity has

even increased with the introduction of corporate sustainability as a

complementing notion, emphasizing the expected role of companies

to contribute to sustainability transformations of markets, consump-

tion patterns, and lifestyles (e.g., Schaltegger & Burritt, 2005).

Yet in this paper, we rather take Ludwig Wittgenstein's stance

(Aphorism 71 in “Philosophical Investigations”), who contested the

merit of singular definitions and sharp concepts for understanding:

“‘But is a blurred concept a concept at all?’—Is an indistinct photo-

graph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to

replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one

often exactly what we need?”Also, the influential American photogra-

pher and environmentalist Ansel Adams commented that “there is

nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept”because it

pretends clearness and takes away imagination and innovation at the

same time.

Management literature suggests that it is favorable if concepts are

to some degree “vague and ambiguous”(Zorn & Collins, 2007) so that

individual managers and organizations have “space”and a certain

amount of freedom in the way they adopt a concept in order to make

it useful for competitive ends and to develop ownership during the

internal dissemination process (Zbaracki, 1998). Actually, “fuzzy”defi-

nitions allow for both experimentation and adaptation to organiza-

tional culture and contexts. After all, in practice, a “business case

argument”is generally based on the five key aspects of strategic fit,

options appraisal, commercial aspects, affordability, and achievability,

and its purpose is threefold: It is used to obtain management commit-

ment and approval for investment in business change, through ratio-

nale for the investment; to provide a framework for planning and

management of the business change; and the ongoing viability of the

project will be monitored against the assumed “business case”(www.

ogc.gov.uk/documentation_and_templates_business_case.asp).

The paper flows as following: First, we introduce perspectives

management ideas and fashions. Then, we provide the context of

the “modern CSR”development in Europe, especially the role and

action of The European Union/Commission as enabler of business

case rhetoric. The review of literature on Scandinavian institutionalism

and links between rhetoric and reality leads towards empirical evi-

dence of how the early “CSR and corporate sustainability space”was

being filled and energized. We draw on the analysis of two expert con-

ferences series in Germany 2004 to 2008. Finally, we discuss findings

and refer to the metaphor of the “business case”as a “Trojan Horse”in

order to successfully position CSR and corporate sustainability as a

management idea.

2|REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST,

REFLECTIONS OF THE PAST

The history of early academic CSR debate was much about responsi-

bility (as prescribed by others) and (voluntary) responsiveness by firms,

especially influenced by the North American school of CSR thought

(see,e.g., Carroll, 2012). However, the very voluntary and normative

nature of past CSR discussions did not adequately link and “position”

the CSR idea with business rationale and practice. In addition, it was

not consistently motivated, guided, and guarded by other powerful

players, for example, governments. Consequently, and may be rightly

so, scholars were wondering if the management idea of CSR was not

only another fad or management fashion (Beckmann et al., 2006).

Coincidentally, around the transition into a new millennium many

societies and businesses changed from a dominant postwar logic of

consumer capitalism (e.g., global market orientation, mass production,

and consumption society) to a system of stakeholder capitalism (e.g.,

“stakeholder society,”service dominant, and market and nonmarket

actors as cocreators; Breitbarth, 2011; Krishnan, 1977). For govern-

ments and international organizations (e.g., European Commission,

2001), key drivers to promote CSR were globalization and challenges

faced by the new economy; new models of governance and the wel-

fare state crisis; national and regional competitiveness and innovation;

sustainable development; and the partnership approach (Albareda

et al., 2006). Against such a backdrop, capitalists, management, and

stakeholders started to increasingly “negotiate”mutual benefits arising

from business activity through discursive interaction.

2of16 BREITBARTH ET AL.