On corporate sustainability integration research: Analysing corporate leaders’ experiences and academic learnings from an organisational culture perspective

Abstract

Addressing corporate impacts on the sustainability of society entails a dynamic capability and management of organisational change. Although the integration of Corporate Sustainability into the corporate culture involves both the physical and social dynamics of business activities, scientific research has been mostly focusing on interventions in the physical dynamics. This article focuses on interventions in the social dynamics, by analysing literature from environmental sciences on optimising social interventions aiming for the integration of Corporate Sustainability into the corporate culture on the one hand and literature written by successful Corporate Sustainability change agents from industry on the other hand. We use the three perspectives of organisational culture change by Martin (1992) to compare the analysis of scientific and practical literature. By reflecting upon practical and theoretical advances, this research identified practical grounded learnings on Corporate Sustainability integration contributing to both society and science that give input for improvements of research on the integration of Corporate Sustainability. We conclude that where Corporate Sustainability scholars tend to focus on one specific Corporate Sustainability integration approach, the change agents intuitively apply what is best in their specific situations, resulting in a mix of approaches. Consequently, the combative attitude of scholars is not very fruitful. Moreover, all three perspectives on changing organisational culture could be seen in both scientific as well as practical literature as developmental stages of the transformation process. Consequently, including the time dimension in Corporate Sustainability integration research enables a longitudinal analysis to capture social interventions. We, therefore, stress the need for more longitudinal transdisciplinary research approaches aimed at enhanced understanding of how culture at different organisational levels may affect the success of the integration of Corporate Sustainability into the corporate culture.