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.
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