Organization & Environment

A distinct obstacle to mainstreaming sustainability is when strategic actions to integrate sustainability create tensions between a firm’s established identity and its projected image. This study examines how such strategy-image tensions are managed. Based on a qualitative, longitudinal study of luxury sports car manufacturer Porsche during the introduction of electric cars, the analysis traces the discursive process of implementing strategic actions that challenge the legacy product. The findings suggest the reconciliation of strategy-image tensions is a three-stage process: detaching the image from the legacy product, constructing a positive narrative around the new product, and endorsing the fit of the new product category to the corporation. The study contributes to research on incumbent change and managing identity-related tensions. It further contributes to the literature on sustainability mainstreaming with a critical discussion of the ambivalent dynamics that arise when established firms attempt to make sustainability “fit” their legacy.

Although environmental interventions require technical and social approaches, organizations often privilege the former. This pattern’s persistence remains underinvestigated. This study analyzes several years of ethnographic fieldwork in a peacebuilding- and sustainability-focused organization through the four dimensions of Connell’s gender regime framework to demonstrate how professional logics in fields with asymmetric gender institutionalization produce divergent organizational gender regimes that prefer particular forms of knowledge, work, and authority. The peacebuilding domain, which has institutionalized gender frameworks, considers multiple knowledge forms authoritative and relational processes productive; the environmental domain, which lacks comparable institutionalization, privileges technical expertise over social and community-based knowledge. Consequently, organizational actors attempting to translate gender-inclusive practices across domains face epistemic and structural barriers. This study contributes to institutional logics by demonstrating how professional logics shape gender regimes through epistemic mechanisms and extends Connell’s gender regime theory by linking organizational patterns to field-level institutional dynamics, with insights for environmental management.

Third-party sustainability measures, such as ESG scores and rankings, are central to research linking corporate sustainability and financial performance. However, these measures lack transparency and vary significantly across providers, raising reliability concerns. This systematic review of 82 business journal articles (1995–2024) assesses how scholars engage with and critically assess these measures. We distinguish two sources of uncertainty that limit confidence in these measures: the quality of underlying data (accuracy, reliability, and timeliness) and how data are combined (fungibility assumptions and weighting schemes). Our analysis reveals that discussions of measurement quality are rare, while methodological rigor is bimodal—researchers either scrutinize multiple dimensions or none at all. We observe systematic associations between attention to measurement elements, data-provider choices, and reported financial performance. We argue that choices about measure quality and aggregation are not neutral but directly shape empirical findings and their interpretation. We outline practical recommendations to advance rigor and transparency in sustainability-performance research.

Climate change is now a focal issue within business school research and education. While laudable, the focus is both inadequate and, at times, misguided. Research and courses on climate change focus primarily on human and economic systems with limited attention to the natural systems in which they are embedded and which are becoming inhospitable to human and other life forms. A growing recognition of the Anthropocene era raises questions about the viability of this continued emphasis, exposing a mismatch between the research and teaching approach being used and the geophysical reality being studied. This presents the sustainable business scholar with a dilemma between adhering to existing academic norms for publication and promotion and challenging those norms to fully address our destruction of the natural systems that sustain us. This viewpoint examines a needed reorientation of our research and teaching models.

We introduce this Special Issue on Mainstreaming Sustainability by reviewing insights from organisational research on how sustainability becomes, or fails to become, mainstream practice. Although organisational sustainability research has investigated diverse approaches to addressing sustainability challenges, critical questions about mainstreaming remain underexplored. To advance this field of research, we define sustainability mainstreaming and identify two distinct types: integrating sustainability within business‑as‑usual and transformative change. We offer a novel framework of sustainability mainstreaming that integrates multiple levels of analysis, organises research across these levels, and identifies the mechanisms that explain why the process of mainstreaming reproduces business-as-usual in some contexts while enabling transformative change in others. We position the eight Special Issue articles within this framework, distinguishing business‑as‑usual and transforming modes of mainstreaming at the institutional, interorganisational, organisational, and individual levels. We conclude with a research agenda on four themes: multilevel integration, the impact of mainstreaming, temporal complexity, and political realities.

The purpose of this study is to yield new insights into the microlevel mechanisms underlying employees’ green high-intensity behavioural intentions. Using the construction industry as an example, this study examined how employees’ interpretation of environmental organisational strategies for the reuse of construction products shapes their intention to reuse, both directly and indirectly through coworkers’ proenvironmental social and personal norms. Structural equation modelling analyses (N = 260 employees) show that perceiving an environmental strategy directly influences behavioural intentions, which is partly explained by proenvironmental norms in the workplace. These findings demonstrate how environmental organisational strategies become meaningful when employees perceive them and integrate them, which can be explained by applying a value-oriented goal-making perspective where norm activation theory provides a foundation. Therefore, internalising coworkers’ proenvironmental social norms to personal norms may be especially important. This study advances corporate sustainability research by highlighting how microlevel mechanisms can support the implementation of circular practices in organisations.

Growing concern about climate risk has intensified calls for sustainability mainstreaming. Yet firms often embed climate risk in ways that reinforce business‑as‑usual priorities rather than prompting strategic transformation. This study explains why this occurs by integrating behavioural and practice perspectives on strategy. We examine how climate‑risk management tools shape the framing of climate‑related complexity, highlight certain aspects as salient, and direct managerial attention towards pursuing business‑as‑usual rather than transformative approaches. Empirically, we analyse global food and drink firms’ open‑text CDP disclosures from 2018 to 2022. Our findings show how an overreliance on familiar, routinised tools can bias firms’ decision‑making. This bias leads many firms to incorporate climate risks into their existing strategy rather than changing it; however, in some cases, particular configurations of perceived complexity and salience enable more transformational approaches. The study advances our understanding of the process of sustainability mainstreaming and its limits in enabling strategic transformation.

To dispel suspicions of “greenwashing,” many companies have adopted more rigorous corporate sustainability communication (CSC) practices, such as reporting an increased amount of numerical, third-party verified data. This has led to claims that greenwashing is declining. In this conceptual article, we propose a more nuanced diagnosis, arguing the importance of distinguishing between two types of greenwashing: Type I, that is, CSC practices by which companies exaggerate the extent to which they engage in actions described as socially or environmentally desirable; and Type II, that is, CSC practices by which companies falsely suggest that their actions contribute to the macro-level goal of sustainability. While Type I greenwashing may have declined, Type II greenwashing remains insufficiently conceptualized and countered, thus posing a major obstacle to mainstreaming sustainability. We identify key features of Type II greenwashing, theorize three discursive devices through which it operates, and outline ways to thwart it.

As sustainability reporting has become mainstream, questions remain about whether disclosed stakeholder engagement supports more democratic forms of corporate accountability. This study examines the extent to which stakeholder engagement disclosures in sustainability reports reflect practices associated with stakeholder democracy and how these disclosures have evolved over time. Using a qualitative content analysis of sustainability reports from 50 mining and energy companies, comparing 2015 and 2022 disclosures, we find that engagement remains predominantly indirect, uneven across stakeholder groups, limited in its inclusion of marginalized groups, and weakly specified. While some companies broadened and diversified their disclosures, others stagnated or regressed. The study contributes to sustainability reporting research by showing that breadth, depth, and uptake are complementary dimensions for assessing disclosed stakeholder engagement. We argue that the mainstreaming of sustainability reporting has not systematically translated into broader inclusion, stronger dialogic practices, or greater uptake of stakeholder input into organizational processes.

By showcasing Sri Lanka’s repatriation of hazardous hospital waste to the United Kingdom, this paper explores how the transboundary movement of waste management business model functions in the Global South. It builds on a framework that integrates the market and legal modes of accountability, regulatory capture, and an ethic of accountability. Data were collected using online ethnography and an interpretive case study method. The study demonstrates how the adherence to market and legal modes of accountability and the violation of an ethic of accountability have created loopholes for actors to capture regulatory and institutional provisions, making the transboundary waste management business redundant in the Global South. The traditional business model pursued in waste management has proved inadequate in realizing reciprocal societal rights and responsibilities and promoting public well-being. This has resulted in an erosion of public trust in government and state agencies. Thus, we argue that accountability-based accounting and the ethic of accountability can potentially mitigate the opportunities for regulatory capture, serve the public interests, and protect the ecosystem.