Commitment Strategies for Sustainability: How Corporations Can Create Value through New Governance

This article develops an ordonomic concept of how corporations can create sustainable value through new governance. The paper weaves together new strands of research in business ethics with the current debate on sustainability. The argument is made in three steps. The first step sketches how the sustainability semantics has evolved from a sociopolitical searchlight to a heuristics for business policy and practice. Elaborating a key proposition of the ordonomic perspective on business ethics, the second step argues that business firms can use moral commitments as a factor of production by deploying individual or collective self-commitments as well as commitment services in processes of new governance. In the third step, we combine these four moral commitments with the three ESG (‘ecological, social, and governance’) criteria of sustainability and derive a 12-box matrix for commitment strategies. We use three case studies to illustrate how this ordonomic matrix can be used to enhance strategic management for corporate sustainability.