Themes in global responsibility

Citation

Jones, G. (2014), "Themes in global responsibility", Journal of Global Responsibility, Vol. 5 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGR-03-2014-0011

Themes in global responsibility

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Responsibility, Volume 5, Issue 1

This issue provides a number of articles that push the frontier of knowledge forward, particularly with respect to finding ways and means to encourage the adoption of more responsible behaviour. In the past I have argued that responsibility must be pursued as an end in itself, that it is more excited by passion than rationality. That does not mean that we do not need a business case. We continue to add to the business case literature in this issue with an article by Maria Federica Izzo that gets us closer to being able to link responsibility and profitability, by looking at the intermediate processes that more directly drive profitability.

A business case is a necessary but not sufficient impetus for the adoption of global responsibility. In this issue we see an argument provided by Nick Barter and Sally Russell that systems thinking as a disciplined practice encourages the adoption of responsibility. For those who prefer to focus on outcomes and are driven by goals then the projects that find sustainable solutions necessarily engage systems thinking and drive people in that disciplined practice. The article by Rüdiger Hahn and Daniel Reimsbach provides evidence of the effects of both accounting and sustainability knowledge on the deliberative and calculative decision making by higher education students. In particular, the more accounting based learning that the students in their study had done, the more likely they were to consider sustainability issues in their estimates of future stock values; in addition, those with a more sophisticated sustainability knowledge made more critical judgements overall.

Complementary to systems thinking is the practice of more integrative thinking. This is thinking that resolves and reconciles apparently divergent philosophical or content areas. Carlos Rabasso and Javier Rabasso provide a fascinating study into the integration of school curricula within an indigenous population in the Philippines. The study tracks the integration of traditional religious and secular curricula with indigenous, forest knowledge. The article is both an exploration and an exemplar of integration, drawing as it does on both a historiographical and an anthropological approach to data collection and presentation.

It is difficult to overestimate the influence of stakeholder theory in the emergent literature. In this issue, Jo Rhodes, Bruce Bergstrom, Peter Lok and Vincent Cheng provides a framework to investigate the questions around how to manage stakeholder interests, guided by the principal of shared value. Daniel S. Fogel and Janet Elizabeth Palmer report on attempts by Coca Cola to increase the sustainability of their operations. Their focus is on the “how” and hence they do not survey the sources of moral pressure on Coca Cola to decrease the use of local resources in its operations. However, anyone who has been watching the protests directed at Coca Cola in recent years, knows that stakeholder pressure is an important driver.

Judith A. Singleton, Lisa M. Nissen, Nick Barter and Malcolm McIntosh raise the sustainability-based problems of embedded carbon and waste in relation to the Pharmaceutical industry and suggest that pharmacists are a powerful group that can insist on better performance. Henry Ogiri Itotenaan, Martin Samy and Roberta Bampton provides a comparative public policy perspective, giving primary attention to The Netherlands and Sweden. Public policy as a discipline is primarily focused on the public (and interests in particular) as stakeholder and politics as driver. Ultimately, these articles add to our suite of influences on the adoption of responsibility by adding to the weight of evidence instances that demonstrate that the willingness of managers to take on a more global sense of responsibility is increased by empowering the stakeholders that matter to them.

A third set of articles within this issue develops the sustainable leadership literature. This is an exciting, emerging area, which sees leadership as a process of developing the constitution and practice of the organisation and provides a range of variables that interact to increase long-term viability and better integration within the community of which it is a part. This is also a literature that recognises the broader community stakeholders. The most explicit example of a sustainable leadership based article in this collection is the contribution by Suparak Suriyankietkaew and Gayle C. Avery, which statistically correlates a range of sustainable leadership practices with employee’s satisfaction. There is also a separate contribution (Tanyu Zhang, Gayle C. Avery, Harald Bergsteiner and Elizabeth More) that demonstrates that a more organic style of leadership can increase important engagement outcomes such as employee/organisational identity, intention to stay and motivation.

Sustainable leadership is an exercise of responsibility as it implies a long-term commitment by leadership to build an organisation and provides the detailed road map as to how to do it. It thus implies a long-term relationship between leaders and their organisations and a focus on building health, resilience and sustainability. It eschews, or is at least sceptical about, short-term results. The 9th Annual International Symposium on Sustainable Leadership is being held this year in Salzburg, Austria from 3 to 6 June. While the submission date for 2014 is past, you can still register as a participant. These symposia occur every year so you can consider whether sustainable leadership frames the kind of research you wish to develop for exposition at future symposia. It typically attracts the interest of both academics and business based intellectuals. It is a great way to learn about the variables that constitute sustainable leadership and there is a great deal of empirical work that still needs to done to investigate the relationship between these particular variables. Details can be found at the web site of the Institute Sustainable Leadership: http://www.instituteforsustainableleadership.com

Grant Jones
Editor-in-Chief