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Keywords Sustainable development, Human resource management, Operations management,
Legislation
Abstract This paper serves as an introduction to this special issue of the journal on the topic of sustainability. It commences with definitions of sustainability, followed by a description of the roles played by governments and corporations as developers of standards and legislation, and investors in products and processes, respectively. The paper then goes on to discuss the company capacities required to achieve sustainability, paying particular attention to operations management capabilities and the management of human resources. The discussion of these topics is related to the content of the other papers subsequently presented in this special issue, and the paper concludes with suggestions for further research.
What is sustainability?
Sustainable development is defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987, p. 8) as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". For the concept of sustainability to be meaningful, therefore, it must refer to maintaining, renewing or restoring something specific (Sutton, 1999), but also include the ethical dimension of fairness of trade-off between current economic pressures and the future needs of the environment. The papers in this current issue therefore refer to each of these dimensions, reinforcing the view that ". . . sustainability is becoming a key business imperative, as the eternal search for domination over nature is replaced by the challenge of achieving environmental balance" (Clarke and Clegg, 2000, p. 46).
Governments, markets, corporations and sustainability
Governments clearly play a major role in environmental sustainability by the provision of environmental standards and regulatory frameworks to conserve productive inputs and the quality of life, in an economic environment where such action may be regarded as cost enhancing and detrimental to industrial competitiveness. Such additional costs can no doubt cause very real problems to industry in the short term, particularly if adequate preparatory work has not been completed, but in the longer term:
... properly designed environmental standards can trigger innovations that lower the total cost of a product or improve its value. Such innovations allow companies to use a range of inputs more productively - from raw materials to energy to labour thus offsetting the costs of improving...