Managing and Measuring the Business Case for Sustainability: Capturing the Relationship between Sustainability Performance, Business Competitiveness and Economic Performance

This introduction provides an overview of the subject of this book, namely how to manage the business case of sustainability. After providing a basic structure of how environmental and social management link to economic success through a number of pathways, various theoretical, empirical and normative approaches to analyse the subject are introduced. Subsequently, the basic link between sustainability performance, competitiveness and economic success is discussed, introducing an inversely U-shaped relationship as a generic case. The chapter then presents the logical corollary of how to measure sustainability performance, business competitiveness and economic success conceptually and empirically, before introducing a framework for the interaction of factors explaining the relationship of sustainability performance and competitiveness. The chapter ends with an overview of the chapters and contributions in this book.