Companies, Stakeholders and Corporate Sustainability – Empirical Insights from Hungary

Abstract

Corporate sustainability is an increasingly popular concept inmanagement research. Many projects aim to lead the business sector tosee beyond its standard goals and voluntarily contribute to social andenvironmental goals as well. However, it is certainly not clear howcorporate sustainability may contribute to the global goal ofsustainability. In our paper, several reasons are presented as to whythe contribution of the `mainstream' paradigm of corporatesustainability to macro-level sustainability may be questioned.Convincing arguments can be made that these have to be radically changedin order to reach sustainability. Thus, corporate sustainability - justlike sustainability - seems to have a strong social learning character.In such a situation public participation and deliberation have highimportance in relation to corporate sustainability. These concepts ofcommunity decision-making may also be translated into the level of theorganisation through the theory of stakeholder engagement.After the theoretical analysis of a business's role in sustainability,the potential conflicts between shareholder value goals and corporatesustainability, we discuss stakeholder engagement as a potential toolfor corporate sustainability. We also introduce the results of empiricalresearch in Hungary which aims to examine stakeholders' environmentaland social claims towards business. It is concluded that it is veryunclear in Hungary whether present market circumstances and stakeholderpressures motivate, or even allow, businesses to move towardssustainability. Thus, before placing too much emphasis on stakeholderengagement's role in organisational sustainability it is necessary toanalyse its possibilities and shortcomings.