Social Sciences

Eco-efficiency is oftentimes considered the gold standard for managerial decision making in an environmental context because it seemingly reconciles the efficient use of capital and the efficient use of environmental resources. We challenge this view by disaggregating eco-efficiency to provide an in-depth analysis of corporate eco-efficiency and to identify the drivers of an efficient use of environmental resources. By building on the value-based approach in financial management, we extend the rationale of economic value Highlights > We disaggregate corporate eco-efficiency. > We identify the components and drivers of an efficient use of environmental resources. > We analyze in detail the capital and CO 2efficiency of major global car makers. > We clarify the relation between the efficient use of capital and environmental resources in firms. > We provide managers with a tool to manage eco-efficiency as an end in itself.

Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard is a management tool that supports the successful implementation of corporate strategies. It has been discussed and considered widely both in practice and research. By linking operational and non-financial corporate activities with causal chains to the firm's long-term strategy the Balanced Scorecard supports the alignment and management of all corporate activities according to their strategic relevance. The Balanced Scorecard makes it possible to take into account non-monetary strategic success factors which significantly impact the economic success of a business. It is thus a promising starting-point to also incorporate environmental and social aspects into the main management system of a firm. This paper proposes for value-oriented corporate sustainability management with the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard. This helps to overcome the shortcomings of conventional approaches to environmental and social management systems by integrating the three pillars of sustainability into a single and overarching management tool. A Sustainability Balanced Scorecard shows the causal relation between the economic, environmental, and social performance of firms. On the one side this paper discusses the different possible forms of a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard from a conceptual point of view. On the other side it shows the process and steps of formulating a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard for a fictitious company in practice based on the experience of a major joint research project in Germany and Switzerland.

Corporate sustainability confronts managers with tensions between complex economic, environmental, and social issues. Drawing on the literature on managerial cognition, corporate sustainability, and strategic paradoxes, we develop a cognitive framing perspective on corporate sustainability. We propose two cognitive frames-a business case frame and a paradoxical frame-and explore how differences between them in cognitive content and structure influence the three stages of the sensemaking processthat is, managerial scanning, interpreting, and responding with regard to sustainability issues. We explain how the two frames lead to differences in the breadth and depth of scanning, differences in issue interpretations in terms of sense of control and issue valence, and different types of responses that managers consider with regard to sustainability issues. By considering alternative cognitive frames, our argument contributes to a better understanding of managerial decision making regarding ambiguous sustainability issues, and it develops the underlying cognitive determinants of the stance that managers adopt on sustainability issues. This argument offers a cognitive explanation for why managers rarely push for radical change when faced with complex and ambiguous issues, such as sustainability, that are characterized by conflicting yet interrelated aspects.

This paper proposes a systematic framework for the analysis of tensions in corporate sustainability. The framework is based on the emerging integrative view on corporate sustainability,which stresses the need for a simultaneous integration of economic, environmental and socialdimensions without, a priori, emphasising one over any other.The integrative view presupposes that firms need to accept tensions in corporate sustainability and pursue different sustainability aspects simultaneously even if they seem to contradict each other. The framework proposed in this paper goes beyond the traditionaltriad of economic, environmental and socialdimensions and argues that tensions in corporate sustainability occur between different levels, in change processes andwithin a temporal and spatial context. The framework provides vital groundwork for managing tensions in corporate sustainability based on paradox strategies. The paper then applies the framework to identify and characterise four selected tensions and illustrates how key approaches from the literature on strategic contradictions, tensions and paradoxes -i.e. acceptance and resolution strategies -can be used to manage these tensions. Thereby, itrefines the emerging literature on the integrative view for the management of tensions in corporate sustainability.The framework also provides managerswith a better understanding of tensions in corporate sustainability and enables them to embrace these tensions in their decision-making.

We argue that the majority of the current approaches in research on corporate sustainability are inconsistent with the notion of sustainable development. By defining the notion of instrumentality in the context of corporate sustainability through three conceptual principles we show that current approaches are rooted in a bounded notion of instrumentality which establishes a systematic a priori predominance of economic organizational outcomes over environmental and social aspects. We propose an inclusive notion of profitability that reflects the return on all forms of environmental, social, economic capital used by a firm. This inclusive notion of corporate profitability helps to redefine corporate profitability as if sustainability matters in that it overcomes the bounded instrumentality that impairs current research on corporate sustainability. We apply this notion to different car manufacturers and develop conceptual implications for future research on corporate sustainability. Beyond Bounded Instrumentality in Corporate Sustainability 2

This paper presents an overview of the results of a longitudinal analysis of the coverage of sustainability-related concepts in 115 leading national newspapers worldwide between January 1990 and July 2008-covering approximately 20,500,000 articles in 340,000 newspaper issues in 39 countries. On a global level, 'sustainable development' and 'corporate social responsibility' seem to have reached the mainstream public arena, whereas the coverage of 'corporate citizenship' and 'corporate sustainability' remains marginal. The increase in sustainability-related media coverage since 1990 largely seems to be of an incremental nature, rather than clearly associated with specific events. Only very few truly global events can be identified that triggered a substantial amount of media coverage globally. Furthermore, marked regional and national differences in the coverage of sustainability-related concepts can be identified.