Organizational sustainability schemes align with weak sustainability

Abstract

While sustainability research is expansive, studies of business-internal practices and resulting sustainability outcomes are largely unexplored. This research fills this gap by assessing the sustainability schemes that organizations internally employ to guide sustainability efforts. Content analysis is applied to 20 environmentally oriented sustainability schemes, through the triangulated lenses of strong sustainability and sensemaking theories. Each scheme is quantitatively assessed for positioning within the Stages of Sustainability model and rank abundance curves are generated to compare relative sustainability strength among the schemes for potential recommendations in practice or future research. Results show that 100% of the sustainability schemes in this study align with various forms of weak sustainability, although five commendable schemes are more advanced than the others. Given this finding, it is expected that applying the sustainability schemes from our sample in research and practice will perpetuate weak, business-as-usual, sustainability while prolonging the wait for strong ecological sustainability. Novel contributions of this research include empirical evidence to support claims that sustainability schemes are aligned with weak sustainability, and the identification of the sustainability strength of sustainability schemes. Additionally, numerous calls from researchers to consider sustainability strength in research are heeded. Implications for practitioners, scheme developers, and academics relate to the development of schemes, business-internal practices, research, and teaching that aligns with ecological science-oriented, strong sustainability instead of the current approach that aligns with weak sustainability.