Despite decades of growing attention to sustainability, business efforts remain systemically insufficient in addressing ecological degradation and social harm. This thesis asks why. Rather than treating sustainability as an ambiguous ideal, attention is shifted to unsustainability as what can be observed and explained: the ongoing reproduction of harmful systemic outcomes. Companies are understood as embedded in wider economic, institutional, social, and biophysical systems rather than as isolated actors. Drawing on four studies in sustainable business model research and sustainable service research, the thesis develops a relational conceptualization of unsustainability from a company perspective. On this basis, it identifies five systemic mechanisms that generate and reproduce unsustainability: unsustainable paradigm, multipolar traps, destructive competition, narrow boundary perspectives, and information and feedback gaps. Using systems thinking from a company perspective, the thesis explains why sustainability efforts may remain insufficient even when they are well intended. It offers a framework for understanding how company activity relates to wider system conditions and what must be addressed for more meaningful change to occur.
Sustainable development has traditionally been understood as a framework balancing environmental, economic and social objectives. However, accelerating climate change, geopolitical instability, technological disruption and growing systemic risks challenge the conditions under which these objectives can be achieved. Des...
Radoslav Ivančík, Jiří Dušek· Sustainability· 1 citation
Sustainability has become a mission critical goal for organizations, especially in the context of supply chains where data on the environment are important in the management of carbon emissions, resources and regulatory compliance. While more and more companies have access to environmental information and more and more...
Nurhanan Syafiah Abdul Razak, W. Al-Madhoun, Tasya Aspiranti· Veredas do Direito· 0 citations
Corporate sustainability research is rich but fragmented where influential frameworks illuminate important aspects of sustainability dynamics, yet they are often used in parallel rather than connected through a shared explanatory logic of change. This paper addresses that corporate sustainability puzzle through a tar...
Omaima A. G. Hassan· Business Strategy and the En...· 0 citations
The measurability of sustainability is a subject of ongoing debate. Discretion is an important antecedent to such valuation yet remains largely unaddressed. Thus, we conduct a cross‐case study of four organizations, finding differences between product and service firms in how they define their sustainability discreti...
Annabelle Müller· Business Strategy and the En...· 0 citations
The sustainability of buildings and the built environment extends beyond energy and environmental performance to circular resource use, health and safety, digital infrastructure, and stakeholder collaboration. This exploratory integrative literature review examines how these established but insufficiently connected dom...
P. Bonifaci, Armand Vokshi, Siarhei Manzhynski et al.· Buildings· 0 citations
Current scientific literature lacks a comprehensive theoretical explanation of how corporate environmental responsibility (CER) translates into sustainability in the context of digital business transformation (DBT). The aim of this study is to develop and substantiate a conceptual model of this mechanism. The methodolo...
J. Zhang· Vestnik of Samara State Univ...· 0 citations
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