ABSTRACT
The concept of corporate sustainability is one that is gaining increasing importance as progressively more research suggests the need for organizations to address sustainability issues in order to resolve environmental and social problems they have helped create (Starik and Marcus 2000; Bebbington 2001; Dunphy et al. 2003). A perusal of bibliographic data over the last ten years reveals a dramatic increase in reference to corporate sustainability. Furthermore, a perusal of annual reports published by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI 2002) provides evidence of the millions of dollars spent annually by companies around the world in the pursuit of corporate sustainability. However, there is growing evidence of complications in the pursuit of corporate sustainability, as people find it difficult to make sense of and operationalize the term (Munda et al. 1994; Bosshard 2000). This challenge of developing corporate sustainability as an operational concept is amplified by a dearth of empirical research that examines the meaning of the concept directly. Scholars agree that the extant research on corporate sustainability is fundamentally theoretical, extremely limited and that it is therefore an area promising for future research (Sharma 2002).
