Facing the Crisis: Sustainable Practices as Enablers of Business Resilience

Dear Colleagues,

The aim of this Special Issue is to analyze if companies implementing sustainable practices are in a sufficiently resilient position to overcome a crisis.

According to the Brundtland Report, sustainability can be defined as the “ability to satisfy current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to satisfy their own needs” (UNWCED, 1987). The analysis of sustainability, which has also been related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainable development (SD), has sometimes been applied or measured based on Elkington’s triple bottom line (TBL) dimensions (1998), namely, economic, social, and environmental.

Sustainability is then applied in companies through sustainable practices. These can be of a diverse nature, with environmental practices being the most analyzed (Gunningham, 2009) and, also, those based on management system standards such as ISO 14001 (ISO, 2019; Wagner, 2020), cleaner production practices (Rebelo et al., 2016), or a combination or integration of different practices (Siva et al., 2016; Nunhes et al., 2020). Among the different benefits these practices can have within organizations, one of the most studied have been the impact on company’s financial performance (Hernandez-Vivanco et al., 2019), although comparative research can also be found (Dögl and Behnam, 2015; Wagner, 2015).

Regarding organizational resilience, it can be defined as the “ability of an organization to absorb and adapt in a changing environment to enable it to deliver its objectives and to survive and prosper” (ISO, 2017). Thus, it seems that companies with higher levels of resilience will be able to anticipate and respond to the changes of the dynamic context, becoming a strategic goal and example of good business practices and risk management (ISO, 2017). Koronis and Ponis (2018) define organizational resilience as the ability to go beyond recovery to consider development of new competences. Related to their proposal, Valikangas (2010) defines organizational resilience as the “ability to transform threats into opportunities”.

According to Fahimnia and Jabbarzadeh (2016), the existing literature analyzing the relationship between sustainability and resilience is scarce. And, thus, this Special Issue aims to identify if sustainable practices can help organizations to become more resilient, and in addition, which kind of sustainable practices are more efficient in achieving this goal.

References

Dögl, C.; Behnam, M. Environmentally sustainable development through stakeholder engagement in developed and emerging countries. Business Strategy and the Environment 2015, 24, 583-600

Elkington, J. Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of the 21st Century Business. New Society Publishers 1998, United States

Fahimnia, B.; Jabbarzadeh, A. Marrying supply chain sustainability and resilience: A match made in heaven. Transportation Research Part E 2016, 91, 306-324

Gunningham, N. Shaping corporate environmental performance: a review. Environmental Policy and Governance 2009, 19, 215-231.

Hernández-Vivanco, A.; Domnigues, P.; Sampaio, P.; Bernardo, M.; Cruz-Cázares, C. Do multiple certifications leverage firm performance? A dynamic approach. International Journal of Production Economics 2019, 218, 386–399

ISO. Security and resilience — Organizational resilience — Principles and attributes, International Organization for Standardization 2017, Suiza

ISO. The ISO Survey of Management System Standard Certifications, International Organization for Standardization 2019, Suiza

Koronis, E.; Ponis, S. Better than before: the resilient organization in crisis mode. Journal of Business Strategy 2018, 39, 32-42

Nunhes, T.V.; Bernardo, M.; Oliveira, O.J. Rethinking the Way of Doing Business: A Reframe of Management Structures for Developing Corporate Sustainability. Sustainability 2020, 12, 1177-1209

Rebelo, M.F.; Santos, G.; Silva, R. Integration of management systems: towards a sustained success and development of organizations. Journal of Cleaner Production 2016, 127, 196-111

Siva, V.; Gremyr, I.; Bergquist, B.; Garvare, R.; Zobel, T.; Isaksson, R. The support of Quality management to sustainable development: a literature review. Journal of Cleaner Production 2016, 138, 148-157

UNWCED. Our common future. United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, UNWCED 1987, Oxford Publishers, United Kingdom

Valikangas, L. The Resilient Organization: How Adaptive Cultures Thrive even when Strategy Fails. McGraw-Hill 2010, United States

Wagner, M. A European perspective on country moderation effects: Environmental management systems and sustainability-related human resource benefits, Journal of World Business 2015, 50, 379-388

Wagner, M. Global governance in new public environmental management: An international and intertemporal comparison of voluntary standards' impacts. Business Strategy and the Environment 2020, 29, 1056-1073

Prof. Dr. Mercè Bernardo
Guest Editor

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• sustainability
• sustainable practices
• resilience
• organizational resilience
• social responsibility
• management practices