Sustainability Management Academics: How's That Going?

490174 OAE26210.1177/1086026613490174Organization & EnvironmentStarik research-article2013 Editorial Sustainability Management Academics: How’s That Going? Organization & Environment 26(2) 135–138 © 2013 SAGE Publications Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1086026613490174 oae.sagepub.com Mark Starik1 Dear Colleagues and Readers, I am very pleased to present to you our second sustainability management-reoriented special issue of Organization & Environment (O&E), part of an endeavor my coeditor, Alberto AragonCorea, the SAGE publishing staff, and I have been planning since last summer. As you can see from the table of contents, we have several articles and an essay (all double-blind, peer-reviewed) that span a wide range of intriguing sustainability management topics. Leading off, in “Proactive Environmental Strategies and Employee Inclusion: The Positive Effects of Sharing Information and Promoting Collaboration and the Influence of Uncertainty,” J. Alberto Aragon-Corea, Inmaculada Martin-Tapia, and Nuria Hurtado-Torres provide a rigorous and interesting assessment of the connections between environmental sustainability strategies and information sharing and collaboration. Using a sample of developed country pharmaceutical firms, they identified positive relationships between firm environmental strategy, on the one hand, and information sharing and employee collaboration in those firms, on the other. Second, in “The Coevolution of Sustainable Strategic Management in the Global Marketplace,” Jean and Ed Stead discuss the design and implementation of organizational strategies that have the capacity to address both socioeconomic and environmental sustainability in developed, developing, and undeveloped societal contexts. Among their contributions is a spiral model of the coevolution of the field of strategic management and the environmental turbulence within and between those several societal contexts over time. Third, in “Organizational Learning and the Sustainability Community of Practice: The Role of Boundary Objects,” Suzanne Benn, Melissa Edwards, and Tamsin Angus-Leppan employ an established organizational learning framework to the sustainability aspects of the higher education sector in Australia. In addition to a pilot study on their topic and in that geographic context, they illustrate the use of an interesting stakeholder conceptual mapping tool and a multilevel model of integrating “communities of practice” with intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing processes. Fourth, in “Business, Ecosystems, and Biodiversity: New Horizons for Management Research,” Monika Winn and Stefano Pogutz highlight a number of instances of business programs that are intended to advance the health of ecosystems within which they are embedded. They also suggest several other possibilities for advancing and preserving biodiversity by business and forward multiple suggestions on future management research efforts exploring these and similar themes. Drawing especially on the field of ecological economics, they, too, offer a 1San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Mark Starik, Department of Management, College of Business, San Francisco State University, 835 Market Street, Suite 594, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA. Email: mark.starik@gmail.com Downloaded from oae.sagepub.com by guest on February 10, 2016 136 Organization & Environment 26(2) multilevel model, in this case, one that features the embedding of human socioeconomic activities within multiple ecosystems. Finally, and as a special bonus, an essay titled “Pathways of Influence for Sustainability in Business Schools: A Dean’s Eye View,” by Sanjay Sharma, describes his sustainability program development strategies as a dean at two North American business schools. He forwards two different approaches for those sustainability academics who have the need and inclination to encourage more sustainability scholarship in schools of business, which he labels the “outside-in” and the “inside-out” perspectives. These scholars jointly deserve our collective admiration! They have worked with challenging submission and resubmission deadlines, numerous reviewers’ suggestions, and the whims of a demanding Editor-in-Chief (yours truly). I especially want to express deep personal appreciation to my long-time good friends and colleagues, Ed and Jean Stead, Monika Winn, and Sanjay Sharma, who individually and collectively helped create, establish, and advance the sustainability management field in North America; to another dear colleague and friend, Sue Benn, for leading those efforts in Australia; and to Alberto Aragon-Corea, my coeditor, who has helped set a similar course in Europe. In addition, I thank the other authors featured in this second special issue whom I am only meeting vicariously through their respective coauthors and their research, and I want to express my appreciation to all of our reviewers, half of whom were also authors in this issue (so, double thanks for double duty!). Finally, the staff at SAGE, directed by Cynthia Nalevanko, did another superb job in getting our issue out in a timely and accurate manner. We are all very excited about this issue and about the new direction of the journal, now focusing on sustainability management. Each of the contributions in this issue follow the widely accepted academic approach of building on previous work (in this case, on various sustainability management works of scholarship) and making unique contributions, including identifying new sustainability management directions for the benefit of future researchers. We are indebted to the for accepting and working with our very time-limited process, and we invite all of you, our readers, to engage any and all of the author sets in probing and developing your own perspectives related to their streams of sustainability scholarship. Beyond summarizing these excellent efforts and encouraging you to read and engage them and one another on this special issue’s offerings, I want to take the liberty, as a new coeditor of Organization & Environment with its new sustainability management theme, to offer some sustainability management ideas that we may want to consider for future O&E article and essay submissions and/or to share online and at O&E-related conferences. A number of these should sound familiar, since they are part of our ongoing Call for Papers in this first year of the journal’s reorientation. That Call, which is in the form of a series of questions, can be found at http://oae.sagepub.com/site/includefiles/Organization_and_Environment_Call_for_Papers_ rev3.pdf. Essentially, the Call asks scholars for submissions on these and other topics: multiple levels of human organization sustainability phenomena; potential impacts of sustainability management research; foreseeable future sustainability management issues; influences, including on future generations, of our sustainability management research, for the balance of our careers; efforts to conduct sustainability management research in collaboration with scholars in other fields; the role of technology in advancing sustainability management; personal/professional sustainability management scholar legacies; research collaborations between sustainability management academics and practitioners; and the need for and efficacy of sustainability management theory. As you can see, some of these suggested topics are somewhat self-reflective, in that they relate to the motivations, perspectives, and ultimate impacts of sustainability management scholarship, that is, what we do as sustainability academics (hence the title of this editorial). The remainder of Downloaded from oae.sagepub.com by guest on February 10, 2016 137 Starik this editorial follows that self-reflective approach by forwarding a few personal/professional sustainability management ideas, practices, and outcomes that I have been considering lately to prompt some of you to respond to these suggestions, as well as to the Call topics, potentially leading to one or more article or essay future submissions to O&E! First, in the last few years, in addition to trying to develop sustainability management theory, I have been attempting to highlight and focus on the practical side of academic life, mostly to increase the visibility and utility of our collective sustainability efforts. That includes paying more attention to the practical aspects of research, especially by incorporating our research content, process, and results into my personal/professional life (including teaching and consulting). One of the actions I have started taking is significantly reducing my air travel, including to and from conferences (given that air travel is one of an academic’s most carbon-intensive professional activities, and that I have probably flown to and from several dozen conferences in my career, so far). Another is tracking and communicating my sustainability management activities and encouraging my stakeholders (students, colleagues, and others) to consider doing the same. These efforts have also included exploring the prospects of training both other trainers and students (including executives and the public) for an emerging individual sustainability exam certification program, eating lower on the food chain and ensuring all of our sustainability program events have that option available, and reducing HVAC and lighting needs, both at work and home, to a minimum (again, after several decades of overconsuming these resources). If you are interested in any of these more practical academic topics and would like to explore them together, including for possible development into an O&E article or essay, please let me know. A second point of this part of the editorial is to highlight the widely shared belief in the necessity of continuously connecting social and environmental sustainability in our research, teaching, and service, in particular, by considering solutions (including business solutions) to poverty, violence, overconsumption, and overpopulation. The need to foster this connection, of course, is apparent not only for the socioeconomic benefit of the 7.11 billion of us human beings now living on this planet (and the many more who will follow us in future human generations, currently increasing at the net rate of about 211,000 individuals per day). But, of course, that social/environmental connection could also include the ecological (even social?) benefit of habitat protection for the members of perhaps 10 million nonhuman species on Earth. In that consideration, on the one hand, we might ponder the possibility that, while we humans have our own ecological requirements, on the other hand, the term and concept “society” (or a yet-to-be-developed concept) may one day evolve to include other sentient beings in addition to humans. This might particularly be the case regarding those members of species with which we humans share much in common, such as other primates and cetaceans. But it could also include many other mammals and non-mammalian animals, especially those that humans consider pets that provide humans with social benefits, such as companionship. My guess is that, if we were to ever take the step of including some of the rest of nature in our concept of society (or developing and using a new term/concept that serves the same purpose), we would probably value nonhuman nature more than we do now, which I hope we can all agree would be a desirable outcome. The number of businesses and other organizations that might be affected by such a conceptual shift could be significant (e.g., just as one indicator of the potential impact, more than 40 universities and colleges, not counting agricultural, veterinary, and law schools, just in the United States, currently offer programs in the study of non-human animals and human society). These business and other organizations would also vary widely by industry, including entertainment, pharmaceuticals, animal care, agriculture, and shipping transport, to name just a few. So, once again, I would be very pleased to engage with anyone who wants to explore this particular sustainability advancement idea. Regarding this topic and any other topics in this editorial, your insights, suggestions, and criticisms are welcome, particularly if they lead to scholarship that can be submitted to O&E! Downloaded from oae.sagepub.com by guest on February 10, 2016 138 Organization & Environment 26(2) If you have read to the end of this editorial, thank you very much for indulging me! My hope is that one or more of these ideas might encourage future O&E submissions, or at least interesting, encouraging exchanges among us, either on-line or at O&E-related conferences, and may even prompt some new professional/personal practices. Sustainability may be a long, complex, challenging journey, but, we can, as the saying goes, “start small, and start now!” So I want to thank you again for reading this journal, and along with my coeditor, Alberto, I look forward to your reactions to our current, previous, and subsequent O&E issues and, of course, to your future contributions! Downloaded from oae.sagepub.com by guest on February 10, 2016