Corporate Sustainability Management

This chapter provides a practice-oriented introduction to corporate sustainability management for students. It first introduces a brief history of corporate sustainability in businesses with reference to selected critical incidents (e.g., accidents environmental pollution) and pioneering firms and (sustainable) entrepreneurs which have developed proactive sustainability strategies and practices already several decades ago. Then the sustainability triangle, a conceptual framework for corporate sustainability, is presented. It aims at economic, eco- and socio-effectiveness by integrating and linking the economic, environmental, and social dimensions through the concepts of eco-efficiency, socio-efficiency, and eco-justice. This heuristic helps to classify sustainability management practices, relate them to each other, check for their synergies, and discuss how to overcome potential trade-offs. For the implementation of sustainability management in practice, collaboration between various actors is necessary. The reminder of the chapter therefore introduces various forms of collaboration available to businesses in order to engage with value chain partners and broader societal partners. Ultimately, the collaboration forms are classified into interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. Each text part contains various questions addressing the readers for their own reflection of current practices concerning the introduced concepts. The chapter ends with a brief conclusion.