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Business firms are placing increasing emphasis on their ongoing "sustainability," which implies a simultaneous focus on economic, social, and environmental performance. A growing majority of organizations have embraced triple bottom line public reporting, alternately termed corporate responsibility or sustainability reporting, and many vie for industry, national, and international honors awarded to the world's "most sustainable" firms. In this article we describe research in which we entered three firms that had publicly embraced a triple bottom line framework, and were recognized as leaders in sustainability in their respective industries. There we conducted in-depth interviews with 66 business leaders, from chief executives to line managers, to capture and describe their conceptions of sustainability. Through thematic and conceptual analysis of the interview data, we present and describe three conceptions of triple bottom line sustainability at work, and outline the implications of each for key human resource management processes.
Changing societal expectations are placing new challenges before business leaders, and are shifting the nature of the business and society relationship. The potential for far greater stakeholder activism, along with a rise in competition from global scale production and trade, have created a significantly more challenging management environment than in the past. The availability and flow rate of information have increased exponentially over the past decade. This has vitalized a new generation of civil society groups, who, along with other business stakeholders-consumers, communities, employees, and governments-are reshaping the set of demands facing contemporary business leaders. Business firms are therefore placing increased emphasis on their ongoing sustainability, which implies a simultaneous focus on economic, social, and environmental performance. A growing majority of corporations (68% of the top 250 global companies on the Fortune 500) has embraced triple bottom line (TBL) public reporting, alternately termed corporate responsibility or sustainability reporting (KPMG, 2005), and many of those companies vie for industry, national, and international honors, such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, awarded to the world's most sustainable firms by industry sector.
What does this mean for the practicing manager and for the human resource function? In this research we explored this question qualitatively and in-depth with a cross-functional, cross-level set of business practitioners, including HR managers. We entered three large firms operating in different industry sectors, each of which had publicly...