In the wake of the 1987 Brundtland Report, sustainable development has become key to the management systems within businesses, and a means by which companies can increase their long-term value. Being a ‘sustainable company’ increasingly means ‘staying alive in business’ and has become a necessity for all kinds of enterprises, from the micro-sized to global corporations. In more recent years, many companies, and indeed governments, have looked at sustainability as a means to combat the multiple challenges of environmental accidents, global warming, resource depletion, energy, poverty and pollution.
However, being sustainable or maintaining sustainability is not an easy task for a company’s management function. It needs continuous support and engagement from the board, the executive management, staff and other stakeholders alike. Additionally, it brings extra costs to the company in terms of hiring trained staff, organising continuous training in the company, publishing sustainability reports and subscribing to a rating system. Sustainability must be nourished by a company’s board as well as by all of its departments, such as accounting, marketing and human resources. By the same token, it is not enough for a company simply to declare itself a ‘sustainable business’ or rely on past measures and reputation; sustainability is an ongoing activity and one which has to be proved by periodically disclosing sustainability reports, according to international rating systems.
In
Sustainability and Management: An International Perspective
, Kıymet Çalıyurt and Ülkü Yüksel bring together international authors from a variety of specialisations to discuss the development, aspects, problems, roadmap, trends and disclosure systems for sustainability in management. The result is a lively, insightful exposition of the field.