Dr. Mehdi Amini’s Article Published in the Journal of Cleaner Production

For release:  December 17, 2014

Dr. Mehdi Amini, professor of Marketing and Supply Chain Management and George Johnson Research Fellow, had an article entitled, “Corporate Sustainability: An Integrative Definition and Framework To Evaluate Corporate Practice and Guide Academic Research,” published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, an international publication for research in the area of corporate sustainability and environmental sciences. This article was co-authored by Dr. Carol Bienstock, professor of Marketing at Radford University.

This article takes a focused review of literature written on the topic of corporate sustainability that integrates a variety of perspectives. The article elaborates an illustrative corporate sustainability framework consisting of elements that are easily understandable and interpretable with respect to tangible corporate sustainability activities and actions. This framework is used to develop a concrete, comprehensive, and multidimensional definition of corporate sustainability.

Practitioners must consider certain implications when using the framework, which include the effects of incorporating sustainability into corporate strategy and external communications to corporate stakeholders; the consequences of including an organization’s supply chain in sustainability efforts; an illustration of the potential synergy between innovation and sustainability; the consequences of incorporating economic, ecological-environmental, and equity-social concerns in strategic decisions and design processes; and, the ramifications of serving as an industry thought-leader in shaping sustainability regulatory policies. The proposed framework can assist in the evaluation of sustainability activities, as well as serve as a guide for an organization that aspires to increase the level and sophistication of its sustainability activities.