Sandra Waddock

Management and the Sustainability Paradox is about how humans became disconnected from their ecological environment throughout evolutionary history. Begining with the premise that people have competing innate, natural drives linked to survival. Survival can be thought of in the context of long-term genetic propagation of a species, but at the same time, it involves overcoming of immediate adversities. Due to a diverse set of survival challenges facing our ancestors, natural selection often favored short-term solutions, which by consequence, muted the motivations associated with longer-range sustainability values. Managerial decisions and choices mostly adopt a moral calculus of costs versus benefits. Managers invoke economic and corporate growth to justify virtually any action. It is this moral calculus underlying corporate behavior that needs critical examination and reformation. At the heart of it lie deep moral questions that we examine in this book, with the goal of proposing ethical solutions to the paradox. Management and the Sustainability Paradox examines the issue that there appears to be an inherent paradox between what some businesses view as "a need for progress" and " a concern for sustainability". In business, we often see a collision between ideas of progress and sustainability which shapes corporate actions, and managerial decisions. Typical corporate views of progress involve the creation of wealth, jobs, innovative products, and social philanthropic projects. On the basis of these "progressive" actions they justify their inequitable distribution of surpluses by paying low wages and exploiting ecological resources. It is not difficult to see the antagonistic interplay between technological and social innovation with our values for social and environmental well-being and a dualism that needs to be overcome. This book is intended for a broad appeal to an academic and policy maker audience in the sustainability and management fields. The book will be of vital reading for managers seeking to reconnect our human chain with the natural environment in the cause of sustainable business.

Management and the Sustainability Paradox is about how humans became disconnected from their ecological environment throughout evolutionary history. Begining with the premise that people have competing innate, natural drives linked to survival. Survival can be thought of in the context of long-term genetic propagation of a species, but at the same time, it involves overcoming of immediate adversities. Due to a diverse set of survival challenges facing our ancestors, natural selection often favored short-term solutions, which by consequence, muted the motivations associated with longer-range sustainability values. Managerial decisions and choices mostly adopt a moral calculus of costs versus benefits. Managers invoke economic and corporate growth to justify virtually any action. It is this moral calculus underlying corporate behavior that needs critical examination and reformation. At the heart of it lie deep moral questions that we examine in this book, with the goal of proposing ethical solutions to the paradox. Management and the Sustainability Paradox examines the issue that there appears to be an inherent paradox between what some businesses view as "a need for progress" and " a concern for sustainability". In business, we often see a collision between ideas of progress and sustainability which shapes corporate actions, and managerial decisions. Typical corporate views of progress involve the creation of wealth, jobs, innovative products, and social philanthropic projects. On the basis of these "progressive" actions they justify their inequitable distribution of surpluses by paying low wages and exploiting ecological resources. It is not difficult to see the antagonistic interplay between technological and social innovation with our values for social and environmental well-being and a dualism that needs to be overcome. This book is intended for a broad appeal to an academic and policy maker audience in the sustainability and management fields. The book will be of vital reading for managers seeking to reconnect our human chain with the natural environment in the cause of sustainable business.

Here's how to make purposeful system change happen! The world faces a multitude of crises that demand transformative changes in how we live and do business. Yet a core question is...how to make purposeful transformation happen? Catalyzing Transformation shows the way through:Innovative organizing processes that anyone can use to catalyze purposeful whole system transformational change for a better world. How transformation catalysts work to organize purposeful, self-aware transformation systems that can tackle complex systemic challenges. Three processes—connecting (seeing, understanding, and making sense of the system), cohering (co-creatively developing shared goals and action plans), and amplifying (implementing, evaluating, and elaborating effective transformative action). Design guidelines for leaders stewarding change efforts in context-appropriate ways. Whether you catalyze social changer, responsible businesses, activists, policymakers, or students of change, Catalyzing Transformation can help!

Transforming towards Life orients change agents, policy makers, activists, business leaders, ecologists, economists, and thoughtful people everywhere to the values and practices needed to build a world where all can flourish, where ‘all’ includes all humanity and all of life’s beings. It provides an in-depth understanding of what it will take, especially in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic and the burgeoning climate emergency, to transform today’s growth-and profit-oriented socio-economic systems to life-affirming ways benefit all rather than just an elite few. Transforming towards Life argues that to move towards a world in which all can flourish, we all need to start telling new, yet very ancient, stories about who we are and why we are here in the world—stories built on relationship or connectedness, responsibility for the whole, reciprocity, and equity. We need to incorporate core ideas about what gives life to systems into all businesses, communities, governments, and other types of organizations—that is, what helps them flourish. Business and other institutions need to create collective value, that is, value for all, and change the mindsets of people engaged with them so that they in turn can generate new performance metrics, practices, and power relationships that enable people everywhere to find their voice and their capacity to participate actively in bringing about a flourishing world. The book concludes with thoughts about how each one of us can do our bit to bring about this necessary transformation.

Our world is fraught with problems that demand attention: climate change, terrorism, poverty, and injustice to name only a few. Healing the World takes the fundamental teachings of shamans—the healer of communities—and applies them to the problems of today, using terms and concepts that anybody, from business leaders to activists, can relate to and understand. It helps people identify their own gifts and find the pathways forward to using those gifts in the world, no matter what their occupation, civic activity, or interests.

Our world is fraught with problems that demand attention: climate change, terrorism, poverty, and injustice to name only a few. Healing the World takes the fundamental teachings of shamans—the healer of communities—and applies them to the problems of today, using terms and concepts that anybody, from business leaders to activists, can relate to and understand. It helps people identify their own gifts and find the pathways forward to using those gifts in the world, no matter what their occupation, civic activity, or interests.

In traditional cultures, the shaman is the healer, the connector, and the spiritual leader or sensemaker. Today in the management academy, some individuals use their intellectual gifts to perform a similar role - mediating between various disciplines, ideas and theories, as well as making sense of ideas, insights, and research for others. This book, based on the work and lives of 28 very well-known management academics, describes what it means - and what it takes - to be an intellectual shaman. It is a fascinating insight into the career paths and the sometimes maverick behaviour that has allowed these individuals to achieve success. Based on extensive interviews, Intellectual Shamans provides both a roadmap to junior scholars and a critique of the current system of academic career progression.

In traditional cultures, the shaman is the healer, the connector, and the spiritual leader or sensemaker. Today in the management academy, some individuals use their intellectual gifts to perform a similar role - mediating between various disciplines, ideas and theories, as well as making sense of ideas, insights, and research for others. This book, based on the work and lives of 28 very well-known management academics, describes what it means - and what it takes - to be an intellectual shaman. It is a fascinating insight into the career paths and the sometimes maverick behaviour that has allowed these individuals to achieve success. Based on extensive interviews, Intellectual Shamans provides both a roadmap to junior scholars and a critique of the current system of academic career progression.

Building the Responsible Enterprise provides students and practitioners with a practical, yet academically rooted, introduction to the state-of-the-art in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The book consists of four parts, highlighting different aspects of corporate responsibility. Part I discusses the context in which corporate responsibility occurs. Part II looks at three critical issues: the development of vision at the individual and organizational levels, the integration of values into the responsible enterprise, and the ways that these building blocks create added value for a firm. Part III highlights the actual management practices that enable enterprises to achieve excellence, focusing on the roles that stakeholder relationships play in improving performance. The book concludes with a conversation about responsible management in the global village, examining the emerging infrastructure in which enterprise finds itself today. Throughout the text, cases exemplify key concepts and highlight companies that are guiding us into tomorrow's business environment.

Building the Responsible Enterprise provides students and practitioners with a practical, yet academically rooted, introduction to the state-of-the-art in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The book consists of four parts, highlighting different aspects of corporate responsibility. Part I discusses the context in which corporate responsibility occurs. Part II looks at three critical issues: the development of vision at the individual and organizational levels, the integration of values into the responsible enterprise, and the ways that these building blocks create added value for a firm. Part III highlights the actual management practices that enable enterprises to achieve excellence, focusing on the roles that stakeholder relationships play in improving performance. The book concludes with a conversation about responsible management in the global village, examining the emerging infrastructure in which enterprise finds itself today. Throughout the text, cases exemplify key concepts and highlight companies that are guiding us into tomorrow's business environment.

It is not often that we have the opportunity to hear from the early pioneers of a social movement about how it grew and evolved, but that is exactly what this book sets out to do. The Difference Makers tells the stories of 23 entrepreneurs who have been instrumental in developing corporate responsibility; offers an analysis of how CSR has emerged as a key business issue, why it has evolved so quickly, and the visions of its thought leaders. The book examines 23 of the key players who have been instrumental in developing the corporate responsibility movement. They include John Ruggie and the Global Compact, Allen White and the Global Reporting Initiative, John Elkington and SustainAbility, Simon Zadek and AccountAbility, Alice Tepper Marlin and Social Accountability International, Bob Dunn and Business for Social Responsibility, and Joan Bavaria and Ceres – along with many others. The Difference Makers is a history and detailed analysis of how corporate responsibility has emerged as a key political, social, and business issue, why it has evolved so quickly, and what the visions of its thought leaders are for the future. It is essential reading for academics, business people and all those interested in the future of the corporation.

Almost every manager today knows that satisfying customers by meeting their quality demands is a critical component of business success. Quality management is a given in modern companies – a competitive imperative. Yet it was not always so. Back when the quality movement was getting started, few managers really understood either the importance of quality to customers or how to manage for quality. Much the same could be said today about managing responsibility. Why and how should responsibility be managed? What is responsibility management? Total Responsibility Management answers these questions while at the same time providing a systemic framework for managing a company's responsibilities to stakeholders and the natural environment that can be applied in a wide range of contexts. This framework uses managerial familiarity with quality management to illustrate the drivers for responsibility management. Companies know that product or service quality affects their customer relationships and the trust customers have in the company's products and services. So, too, a company's management of its responsibilities to other constituencies affects its relationships with those other stakeholders and the natural environment. But why bother? The answer is quite simple. Never has it been easier for employees, reporters, activists, investors, community members, the media and other critical observers to find fault with companies and their subsidiaries. A problem identified, even in a remote region or within a remote supplier, can instantaneously be transmitted around the world at the click of a mouse. Ask footwear, toy, clothing and other highly visible branded companies what their recent experience with corporate critics has been and they will tell you about the need to manage their stakeholder responsibilities (human rights, labour relations, environmental, integrity-related) or face significant consequences in the limelight of public opinion. Managers will discover that whether they do it consciously or not, they are already managing responsibility, just as companies were already managing quality when the quality movement hit. This manual makes the process of managing responsibilities to and relationships with stakeholders and nature explicit. Making the process explicit is important because too few of today's decisions-makers yet understand how they are managing stakeholder responsibilities as well as they understand how to manage quality. Managing responsibilities goes well beyond traditional 'do good' or discretionary activities associated with philanthropy and volunteerism, which are frequently termed 'corporate social responsibility'. In its broadest sense, responsibility management means taking corporate citizenship seriously as a core part of the way the company develops and implements its business model. The specifics of responsibility management are unique to each company, its industry, its products and its stakeholders, yet, as this manual illustrates, a general approach to managing responsibility is feasible – indeed, is increasingly necessary. Based on work undertaken by Boston College and the International Labour Office, Total Responsibility Management is the first CSR manual. Its original case studies add value to a range of tools and exercises that will make it required reading for all managers in need of a practical guide to managing responsibility and to students and researchers looking for an overarching framework to contextualise the changing responsibilities of global business.

This book is the companion to "Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking: Theory, Responsibility and Engagement", which examined many emerging theoretical and normative issues and was released to acclaim in October 2002. "Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking 2" collects a series of essays by leading researchers worldwide to focus on the practice of stakeholder engagement in terms of relationship management, communication, reporting and performance. As stakeholder relationships and business in society have become increasingly central to the unfolding of stakeholder thinking, important new topics have begun to take centre stage in both the worlds of practice and academia. The first part of the book makes clear that simply engaging with stakeholders is insufficient to build successful stakeholder strategies. Companies, considered as the focal entity in a relationship, also need to actively communicate with stakeholders and manage their relationships. Dialogue is essential but can only be useful if companies listen to the messages that stakeholders are sending them. It is also essential to understand the role of power and influence in stakeholder engagement strategies especially if partnerships or collaborations emerge from the relationships that are engendered. The book examines a wide range of corporate–NGO collaborations to determine what makes them effective – and what makes them fail. Conflict management in stakeholder alliances is also discussed. The second part of the book addresses the critically important element of emerging schemes for the assessment, measurement and reporting of business in society and relationships involving stakeholders. A variety of current approaches to stakeholder assessment and reporting are discussed here including social auditing and sustainability reporting. The evolution of stakeholder thinking has led to a new view of the firm as an organism embedded in a complex web of relationships with other organisms. The role of management becomes immensely more challenging, when stakeholders are no longer seen as simply the objects of managerial action but rather as subjects with their own objectives and purposes. This book captures the complexity of managing relationships with stakeholders and will provide both practitioners and researchers with a wealth of information on the benefits and consequences of this practice.

This book – the first of a two-volume series – argues that, today, stakeholder thinking has evolved into the study of interactive, mutually engaged and responsive relationships that establish the very context of doing modern business, and create the groundwork for transparency and accountability. This book makes it clear that in today's societies successful companies are those that recognize that they have responsibilities to a range of stakeholders that go beyond mere compliance with the law or meeting the fiduciary responsibility inherent in maximizing returns to shareholders. If in the past the focus was on enhancing shareholder value, now it is on engaging stakeholders for long-term value creation. The process of engagement creates a dynamic context of interaction, mutual respect, dialogue and change – not a one-sided "management" of stakeholders. Indeed, the authors believe the very term "stakeholder management" to be outdated and corporate-centric. Companies can manage their relationships with stakeholders, but frequently cannot actually manage the stakeholders themselves, because, as the activist and collaborative initiatives described in this volume suggest, company-stakeholder relationships are not one-way streets and different institutions bring different agendas, goals and priorities to the engagement. There are clear implications to the way in which stakeholder thinking is unfolding today. If in the past corporate "social" responsibility was simply seen as profitability plus compliance plus philanthropy, now responsible corporate citizenship – or corporate responsibility – means companies being more aware of and understanding the societies in which they operate. Corporate responsibility means recognising that day-to-day operating practices affect stakeholders and that it is in those impacts where responsibility lies, not merely in efforts to "do good". Companies are now faced with a wide array of challenges that mean that senior executives and managers need to be able to deal with issues including greater accountability, human rights abuses, sustainability strategies, corporate governance codes, workplace ethics, stakeholder consultation and management. Stakeholder thinking needs to capture these new realities. The global reach of multinational corporations has served to highlight the need for the (re)integration of business into society, relationships into stakeholder relations, and ethics into managerial practice. The rise in power of global activism involving NGOs, and global business involving multinational corporations, makes it even more critical today for companies to consider the power and interests of corporate stakeholders when developing strategic plans. The interactivity and mutuality of relationships described in this book make it clear that firms and stakeholders share the power and responsibility to influence both the profit potential of the firm and how the benefits of the firm's success impact on society. This important volume brings together leading academic thought on stakeholder thinking for the first time. Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking will be indispensable to corporate managers, NGOs and academics seeking greater understanding of the dynamics of stakeholder thinking in a world of rapidly changing responsibilities. A companion volume, Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking 2, focusing on practical issues such as relationship management, communication, reporting, and performance, is also available.