Understanding corporate sustainability integration; a framework based on theory and practice

Abstract

Companies have become more aware of the impact they generate on society. Some companies take up the challenge to convert this awareness into an added value to their core business activities. A clear ambition on Corporate Sustainability that becomes an integral part of the organization is crucial for this conversion. An extensive amount of Corporate Sustainability approaches is available to support this Corporate Sustainability integration. Despite the attention of scholars’ research on these approaches there is still the need to improve the understanding of the Corporate Sustainability integration process of companies. To contribute to this understanding this article presents a holistic framework developed by the application of grounded theory. Firstly, the framework specifies the definition of the Corporate Sustainability ambition of the company. Secondly, to determine the integration process the framework exists of various dimensions. Semi-structured interviews, documents and ethnographic observations are used to retrospectively gather data on evidence of Corporate Sustainability integration. The data is coded on the different dimensions of the framework using interpretative analysis. By combining these dimensions, the Corporate Sustainability integration process is analysed on a high aggregated level with the possibility to also focus on the lower level of the specific evidential integration items. To validate the framework, this article presents the outcomes of the application of the framework in several case studies.