지속가능 경영의 통합적 이론 모형

The terms sustainability and sustainable management have become buzzwords among managers recently. The popularity of these two terms is attributable mostly to mass media journalists and management consultants who have actively tried to make a case of and look for success stories of putting them into practice in various industries. Although sharing with general public as well as managers successful anecdotes about the two terms serves well for the purpose of raising the awareness of the terms further, this may be undesirable for the purpose of helping companies formulate corporate strategies in consideration of these two business essentials. For managers to be convinced of benefits as well as proper ways of formulating sustainable strategy, (1) the terms should be defined in valid and reliable ways, and (2) a theory of potential antecedents and consequences of it needs to be established and empirically tested in various studies through an iterative scientific research process. Unfortunately, however, there has been lack of academic research to build and test a theory that can distinguish the terms, sustainability and sustainable management in a reliable and valid manner. As a seminal work on these particular topics, this study attempts to build a theoretical model of sustainability and sustainable management by analyzing anecdotal evidence and findings of existing literature on the basis of institutionalization theory, which has been well utilized to build theories in various social science disciplines. This study proposes that the terms sustainability and sustainable management are closely related but different constructs: sustainability is defined as a corporate culture and sustainable management as an implementation of that corporate culture. It is theorized that in a company sustainability leads to sustainable management that, in turn, helps the company achieve conformance to norms and regulations on social as well as environmental issues, and business innovation. Eventually, company’s sustainable management improves business performance. This seminal study attempts to contribute to the body of knowledge by offering one of the few, if any, theoretical model that may encourage future empirical studies to put to test the suggested integrative model of sustainability and sustainable management. This study employs a typical inductive research method to develop a theory about social phenomenon of focus.