Rüdiger Hahn (2022), Sustainability Management: Global
Perspectives on Concepts, Instruments, and Stakeholders,
Dusseldorf, Rüdiger Hahn, 270 p.
Khatereh Ghasemzadeh
Dans Journal of Innovation Economics & Management 2023/2 (N° 41), pages 263 à 267
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ISBN 9782807399556
DOI 10.3917/jie.041.0263
TRENDS AND COMMENTS
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Sustainable Development (SD) has been at the center of attention for a
few decades with the ever-increasing so-called wicked environmental, social,
and economic challenges. The present book takes a holistic view of the SD in
three main sections, focused on the company’s role as one of the overriding
economic players.
Section A of the book illuminates the history of SD, introducing it as
an anthropocentric or simply human-centered concept. Two levers of the
modern definition of SD are explained thoroughly in this section: Intra-and
intergenerational justice. The author argues that while the former deals with
current generation’s needs, the latter emphasizes not compromising future
generations to meet their needs. Undoubtedly, intra-and intergenerational
justice should go hand-in-hand to guarantee the adoption of sustainability on
all fronts, which is the cornerstone of the United Nations Agenda 2030 and
its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs).
In the rest of Section A, the motives for SD and sustainable management
are discussed and grouped into two clusters a) ethical and moral reasons and
b) business and economic reasons. Ethical reasons build upon the mutual
legitimizing between corporations and the public that oblige corporations to
be responsive to a broader set of stakeholders since they acquire legitimacy
and the rights to conduct business.
The second debatable scenario is the business case for SD that either incentivizes or hampers companies from engaging with SD. Myriad sustainability
n° 41 – Journal of Innovation Economics & Management 2023/2
DOI: 10.3917/jie.041.0263
263
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Rüdiger Hahn (2022),
Sustainability Management:
Global Perspectives on
Concepts, Instruments, and
Stakeholders, Dusseldorf,
Rüdiger Hahn, 270 p.
© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 12/06/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 222.255.206.167)
challenges trigger competitiveness and thus place the burden of competitive
risk if a company fails to live up to such needs. The two approaches should
work in parallel to meet society’s increasing needs and avoid potential tradeoffs between social, ecological, and financial goals.
After this introduction, the chapter introduces the three overarching
sustainability strategies within firms and perfectly argues the differences and
the current caveats with these strategies. Eco-efficiency is the first strategy to
be premised on the mindset of doing the same things better with the help of
innovation and technological changes, mainly at the product level.
The second strategy is eco-effectiveness, which goes beyond improving the efficiency of products and services in search of eliminating waste
throughout the production cycle that is the cornerstone of the circular economy. Sufficiency is the third strategy, a behavior-based concept rooted in
the customers’ and businesses’ mindsets. The section concludes by presenting
the so-called "rebound effect" that echoes the declining impacts of three
sustainability strategies due to the lack of a holistic picture of production and
consumption. Hence, combining these three approaches is recommended to
avoid the rebound effect.
Section B of this book inspects SD from a stakeholder perspective and
discusses the influence of various stakeholders on sustainability and companies. To better understand a company’s multiple groups of stakeholders, the
chapter starts by picturing a taxonomy of stakeholders. Accordingly, stakeholders are identified based on their position as internal or external to
the firm and their relationship with a company that characterizes them as
primary or secondary stakeholders.
Stakeholder management for SD is followed in three steps: identifying,
prioritizing, and dealing with stakeholders. The most challenging step seems
to be prioritizing stakeholders, as they might have common or conflicting
interests with the focal company. To prioritize the stakeholder, companies
consider three criteria of power, legitimacy, and urgency.
The rest of the chapter introduces the five critical groups of stakeholders
for SD: employees, governmental actors, civil society, investors, and consumers. Employees influence via their behavior at work. This takes various forms
ranging from conservative behaviors, such as avoiding harm, to more positive
and proactive initiatives. The main drivers for sustainable behavior at work
lie in awareness and personal and social norms, which can lead to positive
sustainability attitudes if they work in parallel.
The second discussed group of stakeholders is governmental actors
since government failure is the root cause of the unsustainability status
quo in many places in the world. Regulatory mechanisms, also known as
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command-and-control mechanisms, regulatory instruments, and marketbased instruments, are discussed as main governmental approaches.
Civil society, or the so-called "third sector", refers to a group of stakeholders that neither belongs to the government nor to market actors. Civil society
is either shaped in silos such as NGOs or at the overlap of state and market
sectors, namely publicly funded NGOs and public-private partnerships.
The following section revolves around the investor group, which moves
the topic beyond the mere philanthropic nature of sustainability toward
making a financial return. The investor engages with an investment project,
either actively or passively, where in the latter case, the investor decides on
an investment based on a set of negative and positive criteria.
The last group of stakeholders covered in this section is consumers, who
affect companies via their buying behavior. Given that many consumers are
still unaware of the sustainability aspects of products, the first point of departure is distinguishing between sustainable and unsustainable consumption.
Factors that impact (un)sustainable behavior among consumers are manifold
and have been in flux. The section summarizes them as social influence,
habits, routine activities, personal norms, cognition, and a sense of tangibility as consumers tend to discard information that is at odds with their habits,
inner feelings, and social or self-expectations.
The last step presents the ever-widening topic of collaborative consumption and the sharing economy in which ownership is usually replaced with
access to resources. The most common manifestations of collaborative
consumption are product service systems (i.e. car sharing), communal economies (i.e. co-working space), and redistribution markets (i.e. second-hand
markets).
Section C of this book dives into instruments and functional perspectives
for sustainability management at firms. The first chapter discusses sustainability marketing and introduces four central policies; product, price, and
promotion policies, and sustainable product replacement in sustainability
marketing. As hinted in Section B, sustainable products are anchored in the
circular economy and eco-effectiveness approaches in which product-service
systems are rising. When the product-service system is taken to its extreme,
it either relies on pure product or service. In between the two poles, firms
choose to offer products complemented by services or more service-oriented
strategies, including use-related services that decrease the ownership of products and result-oriented services where the customer pays for the result.
Sustainable price policy talks about various costs to consider while
purchasing, indicating that the purchase cost is only the tip of the iceberg
since transaction costs, use costs, and post-use costs are significant associated
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Trends and comments
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costs with a purchase despite being unseen. The promotion policy is inherently accused of conflicting with sustainability because it might increase
demand, leading to overconsumption and materialism. However, promotion
policies can be used in favor of sustainability to signal the reliability of a
product to customers. Lastly, to replace sustainable products with regular
products, firms and customers face myriad challenges due to competition for
shelf space and the scarcity of providing retailers. Recently, solutions such as
online retailing and specialized super marketing have become widely available.
The second chapter discusses sustainable human resource management
with two approaches toward employees. The first approach leverages employees’ sustainable behavior to improve a company’s sustainability performance
by improving attention and eliminating the barriers to acting sustainably,
while the second approach points out a company’s responsibility to its
employees. The emphasis here lies in providing a secure and safe job with
adequate working conditions for employees.
The third chapter introduces sustainable supply chain management and
two strategies for firms to become more sustainable in their supply chains.
The chapter argues that sustainable supply chain management is anything
but easy, due to the multiple tiers of stakeholders and their constant evolvement over time. The chapter presents two overarching strategies for sustainable supply chain management work, either reactively or proactively. The
former tries to avoid and mitigates further social, environmental, and
economic damage by setting predefined standards and criteria and the latter
aims to distribute more sustainable products throughout the chain.
The fourth chapter brings to the fore sustainability in production and
logistics, which lies in three strategies of eco-efficiency, eco-effectiveness,
and sufficiency discussed in Section B. The chapter identifies four options
for a reduction-oriented product that relies on the extension of a useful
and effective product life, as well as escalating product utilization over the
product lifetime and during its use time. Since reducing waste is the ultimate goal in sustainable production, the chapter presents the so-called 4R
(Reusing, Refurbishing, Remanufacturing, and Recycling) strategies to close
the production process loop and enable the circular economy.
Further, the fifth chapter inspects sustainable innovation management’s
foundations. Two conventional sustainable-oriented approaches are identified
as push and pull strategies. Push factors are external-to-the-firm incentives
that urge firms to act more sustainably, as in technology push. In contrast,
pull factors provide incentives to act sustainably voluntarily.
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Trends and comments
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Chapters six, seven, and eight of this section navigate through sustainability accounting, management control, and sustainability reporting. The
necessity of transparency and disseminating reliable information regarding sustainability activities from the firms’ side have entailed a sustainable
accounting system that is considered a basis for decision-making.
The rest of the chapter identifies management tools for sustainability and
categorizes them into three groups: codes of conduct, management systems,
and sustainability balanced score card. Finally, the sustainability report is
discussed as an ever-widening approach to provide stakeholders with the
necessary information regarding the firms’ sustainability status and activities, which comes in different forms.
Chapter nine argues that the entire business model needs to be innovated to achieve significant sustainability results. It introduces eight sustainable business model archetypes premised on previously discussed concepts of
efficiency and sufficiency, closing loops, replacing non-renewable resources,
diminishing ownership, adopting stewardship across the supply chain, repurposing, and scaling up sustainable solutions.
Last but not least is the role played by technological advances and digitalization in sustainable management, articulated in Chapter 10 of Section C,
that could work in favor of or against sustainability.
This book is a blueprint for those looking for pertinent, innovative
approaches toward sustainability management. This book is a well-written
and easy-to-follow guide coupled with several real-world cases for anyone
obsessed with the SD topic ranging from students and academics to practitioners. The book perfectly matches the coverage of the Journal of Innovation
Economics & Management since sustainability is transforming society and
the economy in many ways, and conceiving and managing sustainability and
sustainable innovation is of the utmost importance for firms to lead societies
to an ideal sustained future.
Khatereh GHASEMZADEH
University of Milano-Bicocca
khatereh.ghasemzadeh@unimib.it
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