Sustainability is a widely used term in business today. To some, it means a focus on environmental responsibility. For many in the corporate world, however, its meaning has moved beyond a single-minded focus on environmental responsibilities to include a business’s social and economic impacts. For example, many in the investment community track a company’s sustainable business practices and in ...

Ethical principles constitute a crucial area of debate and discussion in the global conversation around transitions to sustainability, and of particular relevance to the contribution of businesses and other organizations. Scholars in business ethics have recently identified several challenges in this area, such as problems of measurement, rigor, and meaningfulness to practitioners; corporate so...

We investigate the effect of a corporate culture of sustainability on multiple facets of corporate behavior and performance outcomes. Using a matched sample of 180 companies, we find that corporations that voluntarily adopted environmental and social policies by 1993 – termed as High Sustainability companies – exhibit fundamentally different characteristics from a matched sample of firms that a...