Sustainability Mindsets for Strategic Management: Lifting the Yoke of the Neo-Classical Economic Perspective

Abstract

While sustainability has attracted the attention of managers and academicians for over two decades, the macro-level indicators of sustainability are not moving in the right direction. Climate change continues to be an existential threat for humanity and other indicators of sustainability do not fare much better. The logic of the business case and the associated framing of tension between financial outcomes and sustainability have generated a limited and inadequate response to the existential challenges before humanity today. In this essay, we analyze the evolution of sustainability in the business context and call for a recognition that social and environmental outcomes must supersede economic ones in corporate sustainability thinking. We call for a widening of the spatial, temporal, and moral lenses in the formulation and execution of business strategy to ensure that it is in alignment with the needs of current and future generations of humanity and proportionate to planetary conditions.