مدل شرکت های بزرگ از شیوه های کسب و کار پایدار : چشم انداز اخلاقی

This paper considers contemporary business practice and its sustainable performance from the view of stakeholders and their perceived value. A company has responsibilities and commitments to many different internal and external stakeholders in the marketplace and society. This view underlines the need for organizations to, not only provide value, but do so in a sustainable and socially responsible manner. A model is developed based on five, separate but interconnected, elements. The model is iterative and acknowledges its elementary state, suggesting further development and refinement in the field of sustainable business practices from an ethical perspective.

A corporate model of sustainable business practices needs to contribute to the stakeholder value in a broader sense (Waddock, Bodwell, & Graves, 2002). Stakeholder value is a broad concept and implies that a company has responsibilities and commitments to many different internal and external stakeholders in the marketplace and society, not only to its investors and the owners of the company, but also to its employees, customers, suppliers, societies and the environment (Mathur & Kenyon, 1997). In fact, the planet Earth may be interpreted as representing a group of stakeholders consisting of the human, animal and vegetable kingdoms (Svensson, 2008). The IPCC WGI Fourth Assessment Report (2007) is an inter-governmental UN-report and it describes: (i) human and natural drivers of climate change, (ii) observed climate change, (iii) climate processes and attribution, and (iv) estimates of projected future climate change (p. 2). This report supports implicitly the need for truly sustainable business practices in the marketplace and society—a field of research that so far has only to a minor extent penetrated previous business research. In fact, there is still no explicit link between research findings in natural sciences and current business research. Nevertheless, the scientific evidence regarding a progressive climate change is becoming an essential aspect that may influence the ongoing discourse across subject areas in business research. The evidence presented in the mentioned UN-report provides useful knowledge and valuable foresight to different stakeholders that may stimulate the global sustainability and the local adaptability of business practices (Svensson, 2008). The dilemma is that current and future sustainable business practices will have to take place in an era where economic conditions are affected and confronted with a supposed and fearsome climate change (Stern, 2007). Interestingly, the concern for sustainable business practices in the marketplace and society is far from a recent topic (e.g., Carson, 1962). It has been concluded that sustainable business practices and their development should meet the needs and requirements of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Brundtland, 1987). Business research is, to our knowledge, far from addressing the core needs and requirements as well as the multiple aspects of sustainable business practices. Hart (1997) pinpoints the complexity of achieving a sustainable global economy. The dilemma is that current economic models assume continuous growth in the marketplace and society. Wood and Callaghan (2003) believe that this quest to continually increase corporate wealth is at the centre of our commercial traditions. Senior executives usually have their remuneration packages tied to increased corporate wealth and as such, they are personally affected by their company's tangible performance in the marketplace. In the U.S.A. recently, we have seen executives artificially inflate their corporate bottom lines (e.g., Enron) in an attempt to placate stock market pundits and scrutineers: individuals whose every word is voraciously consumed by investors. The true financial position of these companies has been masked by deception. Any performance less than that which was expected, places the company's future in a tenuous and perhaps even a precarious position. If one's company is given an assessment of potential poor performance by these ‘gurus’, at best it can mean stock price instability and at worst a run to sell off the stock. The structure of ‘the system’ leads to the very sharp practices that the same system has enacted laws to minimise. The means of keeping score for corporate success, in and of itself, sets a culture and an environment that tempts one to flirt with danger. Invariably, the way ‘the wealth game’ is played leads executives and others to tinker about the edges of acceptability in the misguided hope and belief that the ends may justify the means. Such a situation is counter productive to sustainable business practices as immediacy, not necessarily longevity (sustainability), is the driver of individual and corporate decisions and actions. The planet Earth needs to be capable of supporting ongoing and future business practices if they are to be considered genuinely sustainable from both an ecological and an economic perspective. There is no simple solution to this situation, but different perspectives may contribute to create conditions and models of sustainable business practices. In the last twenty years, the terms such as corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, triple bottom line, and sustainability have all become part of the every day vocabulary of organizations. These concepts need to be embedded in the philosophical treatise that is business ethics. Not to clearly define these concepts leads to the vagaries of individual interpretation and they drift along in a sea of platitudes and vaguely defined hopes. Our great concern has been that corporate governance, for example, has become just another checklist to be completed and filed and forgotton until the next time the specific legislative requirement needs to be met. The philosophy of expediency is driving the agenda and practitioners tend to move over time away from the true philsophy that underpins the concept. We contend that one cannot have truly sustainable business practices without being focussed upon being ethical. We believe that the sustainability of business practices must be closely linked to the ethical aspects of these same business practices. We see them as intertwined and inseparable. If one adopts an ethical stance then one should naturally be doing business in a sustainable way. In line with this sentiment, the objective of this paper is to describe a corporate model of sustainable business practices from an ethical perspective. The model is outlined and described in the next section.

We contend that the introduced framework makes a contribution to the creation of a corporate model of sustainable business practices from an ethical perspective. The proposed model rests upon the challenge of combining the sustainability of business practices with ethical concerns in the marketplace and society. The model provides an approach to solving the issue of the complexity in developing, managing and monitoring sustainable business practices from an ethical perspective. Future research may gather further empirical support to apply and refine the model. The complexity of the model is required in order to provide a debatable point of reference in business research. The fact is that there appears to be no such model in literature that has tried to integrate sustainable business practices from an ethical perspective. We have made an attempt to fill this knowledge gap. A few tentative conclusions may be drawn from the introduced model of corporate business practices from an ethical perspective. In the first place, the model aspires to be highly dynamic. The model proposes that it should be a continuous and an iterative process. There is no actual end of the process, but a constant reconnection to the initiation of successive process iterations of the model. In the second place, the elements and artefacts of the model construct the dynamics of this continuous process. They provide guidance on what and how to explore our common efforts to understand sustainable business practices. Market and societal expectations and perceptions initiate or trigger the process by determining the issues to be addressed in sustainable business practices. The corporate values, norms and beliefs considered in operational, tactical and strategic business practices should match these expectations and perceptions. Once the sustainable business practices are performed, they will be the fundament of internal and external perceptions that will be connected to the company's achieved outcomes. In turn, these perceptions underpin the evaluations that the society will subsequently undertake. At this stage the process starts again and is reconnected to the commencement of a new iteration of an ethical perspective to sustainable business practices. Therefore, it is important to see sustainable business practices from an ethical perspective as a highly dynamic and continuous process without an end. It is a process, however, that is predicated on the interrelationship between business practices, marketplace and society where each one is interdependent and responsible together for the outcomes.