ABSTRACT
Existing research posits that sustainability tensions exist in companies, but empirical work and managerial sensemaking around tensions have not being explored extensively. We examine sustainability tensions among firms in business partnerships, and how managers make sense of them. To achieve this, 33 in-depth individual interviews alongside one informal group discussion were carried out at 16 relatively large Chinese and New Zealand firms in business partnerships. We found that these firms are faced with complex and multiple sustainability tensions. We show that these companies lack awareness of the importance of tensions by focusing on financial goals, thus putting sustainability tensions into an unimportant position. In particular, the findings suggested that not all New Zealand companies address financial and non-financial sustainability performance simultaneously, while some Chinese companies have started to realize the importance of sustainability implementations and made efforts to achieve both at the same time. We offer scholarly and practical implications in identifying tensions in sustainability.
