The typical approach to modern business includes an orientation of maximum production for maximum consumption. However, high levels of production and consumption have been associated with unacceptable and unsustainable levels of environmental pollution and depletion. This paper discusses how businesses and other organizations can alter their strategic management approaches to begin to adopt more sustainable consumption strategies by focusing on quality rather than quantity.

Firms are faced with the need to develop sustainability strategies in order to deal with the environmental issues they face. This is especially true in the environmentally challenged utility industry. This symposium reports the results of four empirical studies which focus on various dimensions related to sustainability strategy formulation and implementation in the U.S. utility industry.

Sustainability strategies have been found to be an effective means for synergistically integrating concern for the planet with economic success. Enterprise strategy provides an accepted theoretical framework for integrating the moral responsibilities of organizations into their strategy formulation and implementation processes. In this article, we argue that enterprise strategy is an appropriate theoretical framework for sustainability strategies, providing an excellent conceptual system for strategically accounting for the ultimate stakeholder, planet Earth.

It is our view that the major changes required to actually effect Ecologically Sustainable Development (as distinct from merely espousing the notion) include the following:• The emplacement of mechanisms and organisational structures that facilitate whole of government thinking. Current single mandated agencies are antithetical to the co-ordinated approaches required if ecologically oriented decisions are to be taken.• An effective state of the environment reporting system, mandatory if eco-system impacts are to be measured.• A more ecologically oriented approach to assessing risk. This is distinct from political risk assessments which are short term, public assessments which are limited in scope, and business assessments which are largely self serving.We argue that these three requirements are systemically related, and that a gradual process of change should now take place, leading from the traditional 'dominion' approach to one of 'stewardship'. This will involve public, bureaucratic and political learning and ongoing development of organisational structures and planning systems that facilitate the handling of complex ecological issues.

This paper presents the preliminary results of a study of a collaborative process between private, public and non-profit organizations for the planning of 3Rs (reduction, reuse and recycling) programs. The study focuses on the negotiation processes of the participants at the collaboration table. The preliminary analysis reveals a paradoxical finding: the negotiation collaborative process was marked by competition between the «Rs». Should the priority be given to reduction, reuse or recycling?

The assumption underlying these pages is that the survival and the development of a small business organisation rely on its ability to perceive, understand, and interpret the interests and the values of its stakeholders. As a matter of fact, if a business unit firmly attaches itself to these interests and values it has better probabilities to establish a rapport with its interlocutors which is solid and durable, and therefore financially advantageous (because the stability of relations can powedully influence revenues and costs).The corollary is that the interests, the values and the policies of a company must be first known and understood to then be tuned up to the stakeholders' interests and values; in such a way the policies of the company may transmit to the stakeholders the feeling that sharing their system of values is one of the aims of the activity.Thus, the objective here is to describe a methodology (which may be used for a field study) devoted to revealing the stakes and the values underlying the policies of a small company, so that the company will be able to evaluate whether its values and the consequent policies are in tune with the stakeholders’ interests and what needs to be changed.

In this paper the authors propose a much more systematic and inter-related conceptual framework for the discussion of "international business environment". The authors apply this framework to a set of corporations in the Caribbean Common Market using a loose "most similar systems" research design to determine the extent to which this framework is applicable to businesses outside the traditional industrialized countries.

Paradigm consensus, which provides substantial benefits to scholars in academic disciplines, is notable lacking in Business and Society / Social Issues in Management research. Recent developments in the field, including the articulation of instrumental stakeholder theory, may hold some promise for greater agreement on theoretical foundations. Still missing, however, are credible means of aggregating diverse forms of corporate performance data to make the theories empirically tractable. This paper argues that data envelopment analysis (DEA) and, to a lesser extent, reputational surveys (purged of their financial “halos”) are promising methodological means to these ends.

In spite of progress in other areas, SIM research has failed to find any unifying paradigm. As a result, the field has been criticized for its lack of direction and its unscientific approach to understanding the business and society interface. This paper delineates the nonarticulated paradigm which guides existing SIM research, then elaborates a structural paradigm by use of behavioral theory.

This paper describes the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) that is prepared annually by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from reports by manufacturers, processors, and many users of hazardous chemicals. It identifies ways in which the TRI database might be used in business and society research. Guidelines for appropriate use are suggested.

This paper proposes that stakeholder management and issues management are overlapping concepts in both theory and practice. Wood’s (1991) Corporate Social Performance (CSP) Model distinguished principles of social responsibility, processes of social responsiveness, and social outcomes of corporate behavior as the three concepts under the umbrella of CSP. Within this framework, stakeholder management and issues management are positioned as two of the processes of corporate social responsiveness, In addition to environmental assessment. Stakeholder management (SM) and issues management (IM) share conceptual space within the business and society field. Each contributes to understanding types of dynamism in the environment.

Researchers are seeking a measure of corporate social performance (CSP) that is consistent, valid, and reliable. In the meantime, they use whatever measure they can that provides them with a dependent variable(s) that is/are readily available, has been previously used, and/or best fits their data. The purpose of this study is to help researchers understand how various CSP measures relate by replicating the correlation portion of Sharfman's KLD construct validity study (1993) and further correlating the KLD scores with the Aupperle-derived method of CSR and CSP, the Fortune measure commonly used to represent CSP, and corporate self-ratings.

While business goals and values have been measured for decades, the empirical techniques employed to date could be refined. This paper discusses a newly developed approach to measuring organizational goals, values, and virtues, along with their interrelationships. Employing the best of previous methods, the new survey also incorporates a four-tier values hierarchy and a combination of ranking and rating methods. The results of a preliminary study using this new method are outlined briefly.

This paper discusses whether a business ethics course can effect students' use of universal moral principles to evaluate the ethics of certain marketing behaviors. An empirical study which included unstructured questions is described. The author concludes that although the course seems to have had little or no influence on students' perceptions of the ethics of different marketing behaviors, the course did effect the student's ability to use universal moral principles to evaluate the ethics of those behaviors. While universal ethical principles can be understood by undergraduate students after a semester's course, however, these principles are not completely internalized.

Students enrolled in my required MBA course have been investigating how to establish a network of co-ops that would provide job opportunities and improve the living conditions of low-income communities. This paper explores the evolution of the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain, particularly in terms of (a) how the cooperatives are structured and (b) the financial foundation provided by a bank co-op. Practical issues are explored regarding transferring the Mondragon model from Spain to a low-income neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin.

The emergence of a free market system in Poland has revealed a dearth of trained, experienced marketing and management educators. This program was one immediate step toward addressing an urgent development problem in an especially important Polish industry. Executive education for established Polish food company managers in the food marketing and management area would not only improve the productivity and quality of food products to international markets. This would improve Poland's international balance of payments, generate much needed hard currency, demonstrate preparedness for EU participation, create private sector employment, and assist the domestic industry in transforming agricultural commodities to competitive, value-added, branded food products.

Four cases and their teaching notes were presented and discussed by the panel, and then opened for general discussion. Suggestions for improving cases and teaching notes were made, to show the editing process at work. Efforts were directed toward effective use in classrooms, toward possible publication in journals, and toward adoption for books.

This case involves a roofing contractor, hired by the ABC Manufacturing Company through their consultant, Design Engineering, to perform roof work on an older building being renovated for use as a warehouse. ABC is a large northeastern manufacturing company with its own in-house engineering, inspection, and contract administration personnel. Because of unforeseen problems, the roofing contractor is requesting extra payment for costs he incurred on this project. The decision to pay the contractor is in the hand of the company’s contract administrator.

This case describes the situation facing the Plant Man, a floriculture company in the Southeast United States, from an open systems model viewpoint. The organization suffers from a partially ineffective functional subsystem, informational asymmetry, political lopsidedness, and cultural uncertainty. The Plant Man has a weak system of procedures and top management has the only access to key information. Coercive strategies are used as a source of power by top management which affects the cultural subsystem in a negative manner. Data was collected via observations, interviews, employee work questionnaires, and leadership questionnaires. A plan of action is included to improve the effectiveness of organizational subsystems.