Corporate Sustainability – From a Fuzzy Concept to a Coherent Reality

Abstract

During the last few decades, the search for sustainability has experienced a tremendous momentum, encompassing all the levels of the global system. Fuelled by complex (both proactive and reactive) motivators, the process has surpassed the characteristics of an intellectual endeavor – more preoccupied by idealist goals, and less focused on the actual means to achieve them – and has proved that it can successfully be transposed into the corporate real world – of decision making, objective assessment, and relentless scrutiny. The paper aims to (broadly) explore the world of the most sustainable corporations – based on a descriptive (factual and dynamic) analysis of Corporate Knight’s annual rankings (2016-2018) of the Most Sustainable Corporations – in order to: (a). determine (by comparing and contrasting) the main features these organizations – able to transform the fuzzy concept of corporate sustainability into a coherent reality – display; and (b). set the premises for future (narrower) researches – aiming to explain the “how-s” behind the design, development and implementation of the strategies these corporations follow in their search for (sustainable) competitiveness.

Keywords

• corporate sustainability
• sustainability assessment
• world’s most sustainable corporations