Editorial: Advancing Corporate Sustainability, CSR, and Business Ethics

• Published in: Business & professional ethics journal 2014-01, Vol.33 (4), p.287-296
• Main Authors: Hansen, Erik G., Zvezdov, Dimitar, Harms, Dorli, Lenssen, Gilbert
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0277-2027
• DOI: 10.5840/bpej201512118

Environmental, social and ethical issues have become increasingly important for businesses due to changed customer expectations, more regulation and stakeholder pressure, amongst others. This led to the development of concepts such as sustainability management, corporate social responsibility (CSR), stakeholder management and business ethics. Though mostly developed in isolation, scholars have increasingly worked on their integration. This editorial sheds light on (missing) overlaps between these concepts. We find that sustainability management and CSR have become more integrated and are increasingly grounded in an “embedded view” in which business and society is part of (and constrained by) the natural environment. In contrast, business ethics has not been integrated to the same extent, expect for the subfield of environmental ethics. After this general overview, we introduce the individual contributions to the special issue which are advancing the conceptual and empirical foundation of sustainability management, CSR, and business ethics.