Sustainable business and environment management

Sanjay Kumar Singh (College of Business, Abu Dhabi University, Abu Dhabi, UAE)

Management of Environmental Quality

ISSN: 1477-7835

Article publication date: 28 December 2018

Issue publication date: 7 January 2019

4063

Citation

Singh, S.K. (2019), "Sustainable business and environment management", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 2-4. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEQ-01-2019-213

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited


Sustainable business and environment management

Sustainable business and environment management is the key competitive advantage in the twenty-first century world. The sustainable management of people, process and product is a difficult task and firms should install a sustainable architecture to get the best out of both “mind-share” and “market-share” philosophy (Singh, 2018b). Leaders and managers across industry are engaged in developing organizational sustainable capabilities through fundamental changes in the organizational processes and systems to practice green management to develop green products and services. However, it has been observed that plants located in the emerging economies than in the industrialized and the developing countries are more particular to emphasize environmental initiatives across organizational processes, products and services (Schoenherr, 2012). Therefore, it call upon leaders and manager to increase organizational abilities to manage emerging challenges faced in both internal and external environments of the firms (Singh, 2018a, b).

Previous studies note that sustainability increases firms’ competitiveness (Boons and Lüdeke-Freund, 2013; El-Kassar and Singh, 2018), creates environmental and social benefits (Boons et al., 2013; Patnaik et al., 2018) and at the same time the literature suggest for knowledge gap with regard to investing in sustainable innovation to gain benefit from sustainable business models (Schaltegger et al., 2016; Singh and El-Kassar, 2019). Furthermore, it has also been found that the feed-in-tariff positively impacts nation’s gross domestic product, employment and emission reduction and that calls upon the firms to increasingly practice eco-innovation (Fernando et al., 2019). This special issue on “Sustainable business and environment management” was conceptualized to advance body of knowledge on how to leverage the best from sustainability as philosophy to manage people, processes, products and services in organizations across industry.

The first paper titled “Green supply chain practice adoption and firm performance: manufacturing SMEs in Uganda” is contemporary. It discusses about how to leverage green supply chain practices to enhance firm performance in small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The second paper titled “Conceptual aspects of environment security: evidence from India and Bangladesh.” This paper brings about conceptual understanding on environment security by drawing on literature based evidence from two south Asia countries – India and Bangladesh.

The next paper titled “Sustain and legitimize reputation: the construction of the sustainability discourse of Samarco company.” The paper mentions about ethos which relates to firm’s image while “pathos” has capacity to trigger emotional reception of that image of the firms and to provoke positive expectations.

The fourth paper titled “Enablers of sustainable industrial ecosystem: framework and future research directions.” It elaborates upon the enablers of sustainable industrial ecosystem and uses them together to present a framework for use of academia and practitioners.

The fifth paper titled “Accounting for environmental costs as an instrument of environmental controlling in the company” is in the context of the implementation of the sustainable development strategy. It asks for the leaders, managers and policy makers to apply and the systematization of methods, functions and tools, as well as the consideration of the environmental controlling tools in the firms to reap their benefits.

The sixth paper titled “Is sustainable reporting (ESG) associated with performance? Evidence from the European banking sector” deals with investigating the relationship between ESG and bank’s operational, financial and market performance. It further discusses about implications for theory, practice and policy making.

The next paper titled “Diversity, corporate governance and CSR reporting: a comparative analysis between top-listed firms in Egypt, Germany and the US.” This paper explores the influence of diversity and corporate governance structure corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting practices of firms in the context of both developing and developed country.

The eighth paper titled “Eco-capability role in health care facility’s performance: natural resource-based view and dynamic capabilities paradigm.” This paper is contemporary and discusses about developing environmental strategy in three areas, namely human, technology and relationship resources.

The ninth paper titled “Institutional pressures and corporate environmental management maturity.” It discusses and emphasizes on the relevance of numerous institutional pressures in pushing the firms in the developing countries to benefit from higher levels of environmental management maturity.

The tenth paper titled “Critical success factors for sustainable construction: a literature review” synthesizes and evaluates the extant relevant literature in the field. It presents broad list of factors for sustainable construction based upon integrating literature from a variety of disciplines and stakeholders.

The next paper titled “Examining the effect of employee green involvement on perception of corporate social responsibility: moderating role of green training” is in the Indian context. It presents how employee green involvement influences their perception of CSR. It also discusses about how employee green training moderates on to the relationship between employee green involvement and their perception of CSR.

The 12th paper titled “An analysis of the community perceptions of well-being: special reference to nickel mining and processing industry.” This paper developed and validated instrument on the community well-being in the context of nickel mining activities in Indonesia.

The 13th paper titled “Environmental concern: an issue for poor or rich” wherein the role of environmental concern on brand preference has been discussed. The paper suggests that social influence indirectly influences preferences for brand through environmental concern and attitude toward environment-friendly product.

The penultimate paper titled “Consequences of consumers’ emotional responses to government’s green initiatives: insights from a scenario-based experimental study.” This paper develops body of knowledge in the field on social sustainability by investigating on the impact of emotional responses to the government’s green initiatives.

The last paper titled “Silk Road Economic Belt strategy and industrial total factor productivity: evidence from Chinese industries” assesses the effectiveness of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) strategy and its role of industrial productivity in China. This paper elaborates upon the short-term impact of SREB strategy.

We hope that this special issue is timely and answers many pertinent issues in the realm of sustainable business and environment management and the readers will like these 15 papers.

References

Boons, F. and Lüdeke-Freund, F. (2013), “Business models for sustainable innovation: state-of-the-art and steps towards a research agenda”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 45, pp. 9-19.

Boons, F., Montalvo, C., Quist, J. and Wagner, M. (2013), “Sustainable innovation, business models and economic performance: an overview”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 45, pp. 1-8.

El-Kassar, A.N. and Singh, S.K. (2018), “Green innovation and organizational performance: the influence of big data and the moderating role of management commitment and HR practices”, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.12.016

Fernando, Y., Jabbour, C.J.C. and Wah, W.X. (2019), “Pursuing green growth in technology firms through the connections between environmental innovation and sustainable business performance: does service capability matter?”, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Vol. 141, pp. 8-20.

Patnaik, S., Temouri, Y., Tuffour, J., Tarba, S. and Singh, S.K. (2018), “Corporate social responsibility and multinational enterprise identity: insights from a mining company’s attempt to localize in Ghana”, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 604-623.

Schaltegger, S., Lüdeke-Freund, F. and Hansen, E.G. (2016), “Business models for sustainability: a co-evolutionary analysis of sustainable entrepreneurship, innovation, and transformation”, Organization & Environment, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 264-289.

Schoenherr, T. (2012), “The role of environmental management in sustainable business development: a multi-country investigation”, International Journal of Production Economics, Vol. 140 No. 1, pp. 116-128.

Singh, S.K. (2018a), “Managing organizational change in emerging markets”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 31 No. 1, pp. 2-3.

Singh, S.K. (2018b), “Sustainable people, process and organization management in emerging markets”, Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 774-776.

Singh, S.K. and El-Kassar, A.N. (2019), “Role of big data analytics in developing sustainable capabilities”, Journal of Cleaner Production.

Further reading

Buffa, F., Franch, M. and Rizio, D. (2018), “Environmental management practices for sustainable business models in small and medium sized hotel enterprises”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 194, pp. 656-664.

Wei, W., Zhao, Y., Wang, J. and Song, M. (2019), “The environmental benefits and economic impacts of Fit-in-Tariff in China”, Renewable Energy, Vol. 133, pp. 401-410.

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