A Retrospective and Foresight: Bibliometric Review of International Research on Strategic Management for Sustainability, 1991–2019

Sustainable Leadership Practices and Competencies of SMEs for Sustainability and Resilience: A Community-Based Social Enterprise Study

Current studies on how a sustainability leadership theory can influence the practice of SMEs, such as a context of community-based social enterprises, is still lacking, with scanty research to date. These small enterprises in the bottom of the pyramid settings are indeed the important socio-economic backbone of many nations around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has significantly hit all sectors and has adversely impacted them. Our study aims to broaden the limited scholarly knowledge and advance the developing SL theory in this realm. Hence, our critical research inquiries address: (1) What are the essential sustainable leadership practices and sustainability competencies for sustainability and resilience in a CBSE context? (2) How can a CBSE business apply the theoretical frameworks in practice to survive and thrive for sustainable futures, especially during the COVID-19 era? This study employs an integrative theoretical examination of sustainable leadership frameworks and sustainability leadership competencies to investigate the sustainable business practices in the SME sector, particularly in a community-based social enterprise context. Our business case centers on a green, social enterprise, which is an award-winner of Best Responsible Tourism and is located in a small coastal fishing village of Thailand. Using a case study research method, the multi-data collection methods include in-depth interviews and focus groups with multiple stakeholders. Evidence was found to comply with six-category sustainable leadership practices and five essential sustainability leadership competencies to varying degrees. The findings suggest that sustainable leaders and entrepreneurs should develop and integrate the value-based practices and competencies (i.e., strategic, systems thinking, interpersonal, anticipatory, ethical competencies) in business. The critical sustainable practices include enabling human capital with care for stakeholders, fostering ethical values and norms via altruism, cultivating social capital through social innovation, and supporting pro-environmental behavior and social responsibility to achieve inclusive growth, sustainability and resilience. The research results advance the theoretical development of the interconnected fields of sustainability leadership and sustainable entrepreneurship. An alternative sustainable business model for sustainability and resilience is also proposed. Overall, the insightful findings can provide practical advice and beneficial policy implications for sustainable futures.

COVID-19 Impacts and Sustainability Strategies for Regional Recovery in Southeast Asia: Challenges and Opportunities

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis is threatening our progressive social, ecological and economic development toward achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Studies of its impacts on sustainable development in emerging economies and on fast-growing regional development, such as Southeast Asia or the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), are scarce to date. This paper aims to investigate the COVID-19 impacts and identify challenges and opportunities for possible sustainable recovery solutions with respect to the UN SDGs. We employed a qualitative research method through analytical literature reviews and in-depth interviews with 33 organizations. Our results reveal various pandemic effects, challenges and opportunities for cooperative regional sustainability development and recovery strategies, such as intra-trade strategy, green economy and public–private–people partnerships. The findings provide practical guidance on policy implications for transformative regional sustainability and innovative recovery strategies to achieve the sustainable development agendas (i.e., ASEAN Community Vision 2025 and UN 2030 Agenda). Overall, the paper contributes to advance our limited understanding in this realm and benefits diverse stakeholders toward our sustainable futures.

Reviewing COVID-19 Literature on Business Management: What It Portends for Future Research?

Who could have imagined that the COVID-19 crisis would affect the whole world? This means that all aspects of society, in general, have felt the consequences of the measures imposed to reduce contagion. Firms, businesses, and their management had to be and must continue to be resilient, and entrepreneurs creative to overcome the present and future impacts of the pandemic, which will be long-lasting. This study aims to map the existing literature on the topic and identify emerging ones. To provide a robust response to this objective, qualitative methodology was adopted through content analysis of the selected documents and the use of MAXQDA software to analyze qualitative data. In addition, a descriptive analysis of the selected documents is presented. The results obtained show there is still a shortage of studies, principally empirical ones, addressing this subject, to complete existing knowledge and thereby contribute to understanding the effects of the virus on businesses and their management. The main contribution of this article lies in a first systematization and coding of the literature, to identify emerging topics for study by academics, the foremost agents of knowledge.

Renewable Energy Producers’ Strategies in the Visegrád Group Countries

Companies that belong to the energy sector can use Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for their strategies and diversify electrical energy production with reverence to the natural environment. This article aims to analyze sustainability strategy types among the Visegrád Group (V4) countries’ energy producers, who decided to generate electrical energy from the renewable resources. This research uses an inductive inference approach supported by a literature study and deductive reasoning supported by a statistical reference method. The main finding is that the energy producers from the V4 group have a common direction of evolution in their strategies. This change is based on a growing share of renewable energy sources to achieve environmental excellence strategies. The lack of renewable energy sector organizations’ strategies translates into disappointment with the goals pursued by these organizations. The significance of this study lies in an explanation of how sustainability strategies compare at a firm and country-level in a proposed classification. The analysis can open future research areas to examine development of strategies in the renewable energy sector.

Sustainability Reporting in the Public Realm—Trends and Patterns in Knowledge Development

In the wake of increased awareness, as there has been an increasing need for sustainability reporting, research studies have evolved over time. Addressing the challenges and pathways of research in the particular realm of public entities was appropriate to enrich the scientific literature. Since prior studies either conducted a structured literature review on non-financial reporting formats or were focused exclusively on social and environmental accounting, and no bibliometric review has yet been conducted on sustainability reporting in the public sector, this study aims to fill this gap. The objective of the paper is to identify the trends and patterns in knowledge development in the area of sustainability reporting in the public sector to investigate its structure and derive inferences and insights. Bibliometric results reveal that research in this field is still at an early stage, showing an unsteady, slightly upward trend. The literature responded well to the need to enhance the understanding of the public institutions’ role in advancing non-financial reporting and evolved along with the continuous development of the related voluntary frameworks (e.g., GRI, <IR>). In this assent, further studies approaching the first mandatory regulation of non-financial information disclosure (Directive 95/2014/EU) are encouraged.

Covid-19 shock: Development of strategic management framework for global energy

Energy resources are vital for the economic development of any nation, and they are currently recognised as an essential commodity for human beings. Many countries are facing various levels up to severe energy crisis due to limited natural resources, coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic. This crisis can lead to the shutdown or restriction of many industrial units, limited energy access, exacerbating unemployment, simultaneous impacts on people's lives. The main reason for these problems is the increasing gap between energy supply and demand, logistics, financial issues, as well as ineffective strategic planning issues. Different countries have different visions, missions, and strategies for energy management. Integrated strategic management is requisite for managing global energy. This study aims to develop a strategic management framework that can be used as a methodology for policymakers to analyse, plan, implement, and evaluate the energy strategy globally. A conceptual research method that relies on examining the related literature is applied to develop the framework. The present study yielded two main observations: 1) The identification of key concepts to consider in designing the strategic management framework for global energy, and 2) A strategic management framework that integrates the scope, process, important components, and steps to manage global energy strategies. This framework would contribute to providing a standard procedure to manage energy strategies for policymakers at the global, regional, national, state, city, district, and sector levels.

A Meta-Synthesis of Bibliometric Reviews of Research on Managing for Sustainability, 1982–2019

This review of research used meta-synthesis to integrate findings from seven bibliometric reviews of research on managing for sustainability in different management disciplines: leadership, human resource management, entrepreneurship management, innovation management, supply chain management, knowledge management, and strategic management. The purposes of the review were to document empirically key features of this knowledge base as well as to identify leading journals, and documents. The meta-synthesis analyzed bibliographic data associated with 9927 relevant documents sourced from the Scopus index. The review confirmed the existence of a large body of management research on sustainability. This research, which first emerged during the 1980s, has grown exponentially since 2010. Although authorship of this corpus has been concentrated in Anglo-American-European (AAE) societies (60%), the authors of this corpus represent 140 different societies. Moreover, there is a recent trend of increasing contributions from developing societies such as China, India, Malaysia, Brazil, and South Africa. There are large differences in the “between-discipline” proportion of research produced on sustainability topics, with knowledge management and supply chain management evidencing the largest and human resource management the smallest proportions of this literature. The review also provided insight into the most influential journals (e.g., Journal of Cleaner Production, Sustainability, International Journal of Production Economics, Business Strategy and the Environment) and documents in the literature on managing for sustainability. Document co-citation analysis yielded three key conceptual themes within this literature: Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Strategic Management of Resources for Sustainability, Social Entrepreneurship. This analysis further highlighted the central role that strategic management theories have played in shaping sustainability discourse across the different management disciplines.

Between Sustainable and Temporary Competitive Advantages in the Unstable Business Environment

Gaining a competitive advantage assumes that a company should build a unique position, but this concept is related to a relatively stable environment. However, it is difficult to predict the consequences of the enterprises’ changes, leading to changes both in the business and natural environment. Therefore, this study’s authors asked a research question: Is it possible to restore a balance between durability and variability of the organization in terms of strategy? The answer to such a question was drawn upon the literature review and survey research. This paper presents a qualitative and quantitative model of competitive advantage in a changing business environment. This article uses an inductive inference method supported by a literature study and a deduction method supported by statistical calculations, based on a survey conducted among 150 Polish companies in different economic sectors. As a result of the research methods, a dualistic competitive advantage model in a changing environment was proposed and discussed. The article’s aim was achieved in the model combining a sustainable (SCA) and temporary competitive advantage (TCA). Understanding the conditions for gaining competitive advantage allowed to formulate general conditions under which sustainable strategic management can be built to consider sustainability objectives and contribute to the green economy. This research has confirmed that building a competitive advantage in unstable conditions requires finding a balance between implementing the planned development strategy and using new opportunities.

Sustainable Strategic Management Model for Hotel Companies: A Multi-Stakeholder Proposal to “Walk the Talk” toward SDGs

As we reach the fifth anniversary of the Declaration of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the tourism sector responsible for over 10% of the world’s GDP still does not have an open-source, sustainable management criteria that would enable and empower them to “walk the talk” to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap in the social sciences and business management literature by providing a theoretical Sustainable Strategic Management Model (SSMM) proposal for the Fourth Sector (4S), Small- and Medium-sized (SMEs) Hotel companies (4S-SM-HCs), which are committed and have the will to contribute firmly to the 2030 Agenda. Based on their corporate purpose and aligned with the SDGs, this article provides a holistic proposal with a multi-stakeholder approach, adding the SDG perspective. Through a qualitative research methodology based on two focus groups in which the main stakeholders and the management team of the 4S-SM-HC under examination took part, a theoretical SSMM is co-defined so that the hotel company can make significant contributions to the five areas of the SDGs. Basing their structure on the internationally recognized Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) Criteria and co-created through social learning, this SSMM proposes four strategic management axis and develops ten principles of ethical performance (PEP). The main contributions of this article are two: (1) to provide an ecosystemic SSMM proposal to the 4S-SM-HCs to allow them to make significant contributions to the SDGs, and (2) to facilitate a methodological framework with a multi-stakeholder approach and SDG perspective to enable them to contribute to the wellbeing of people, the community and the planet.

Integrating Sustainability into Corporate Strategy: A Case Study of the Textile and Clothing Industry

This paper aims to explore a set of institutional, organizational, and individual drivers of and barriers to the integration of sustainability into the corporate strategy of a European textile and clothing (T&C) company. The methodology is based on a case study of the exemplar VAUDE, a family-owned sustainable outdoor outfitter company. The results are in accordance with institutional theory and stakeholder theory as a theoretical framework explaining why companies deal with sustainability. The determined drivers depend on coherence at all levels of analysis, i.e., institutional, organizational, and individual. The barriers found are of an institutional and organizational nature only. The findings present significant practical implications for other T&C companies that seek to integrate sustainability into their corporate strategy and for the T&C industry to create a sustainability-friendly environment to drive more companies to become sustainable. It further supports T&C companies in identifying potential barriers, determining how to overcome them, and successfully integrating sustainability into their corporate strategy. To conclude, the results suggest that it only works if sustainability is strongly integrated into the corporate strategy and deeply anchored in all departments and daily tasks of a T&C company.

Corporate Citizenship: Structuring the Research Field

Corporate citizenship, which is firms’ societal engagement beyond customer and shareholder interests, is a prominent topic in management practice and has led to extensive research. This increased interest resulted in a complex and fragmented scholarly literature. In order to structure and map the field quantitatively, we conducted a temporal analysis of publications and citations, an analysis of the productivity of involved disciplines, an analysis of the productivity of publication forms including journal impact factors, an author productivity and citation analysis, a co-author analysis, an article citation analysis, an article co-citation analysis, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis. Results of these bibliometric analyses show that corporate citizenship research seems to have been in a phase of stagnation since 2014 and shows a rather low degree of interdisciplinarity. Papers are predominantly published in high impact journals. Authors show little collaboration with other researchers. Current research relates to other business ethics topics, addresses philosophical foundations, and starts to relate to human resource management and organization studies.