The Social Capital Building Approach to Corporate Sustainability Management

Along with the uprising of sustainability issues in the field of business and management, firms increasingly strategize and mobilize resources towards sustainability related activities and processes much more than ever. Together with this phenomenon, the concept of corporate sustainability has been noticed much more by scholars and practitioners from diverse fields. However, differently with an expectation, it is undoubted that there is a small controversy when we treat the issues related to its definition, antecedents, consequences, processes and so on. Based on this kind of understanding, this study tries to suggest and advance a new approach to the corporate sustainability based on the premises of social capital theory for social relations, which explains the role of institutions, and norms that shape firms’ social interactions. Main argument is that firm’s voluntary, progressive, and proactive activities for sustainability issues can be understood as the firm’s social capital building processes. Though there are a little existing study dealing with this issue, this study has a difference with them by proposing social capital building issues based on firm’s real activities. Finally, case analyses based on a new approach are suggested and the theoretical considerations with some limitations are explained.