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Crisi sanitaria e crisi ambientale: quale futuro per la sostenibilità d'impresa?
Abstract
Sin da quando in Italia si è presa coscienza della pandemia che si stava diffondendo, molto è stato detto e scritto sui rapporti tra ambiente, salute ed economia. Rapporti che hanno trovato spazio anche nei richiami ad un green deal italiano nel Decreto Rilancio. In tal contesto, questo capitolo si pone l'obiettivo di analizzare come la più irruente pandemia e la più importante crisi economica del secolo potranno impattare sulle future traiettorie attraverso le quali le imprese italiane perseguiranno i propri obiettivi di sostenibilità. A tale scopo, l'analisi prende spunto, nella prima sezione, dalle principali evidenze che caratterizzano l'attuale quadro di crisi ecologica e dalle criticità del modello antropocentrico-estrattivista messo in crisi dalla pandemia. Nella seconda sezione, i primi dati disponibili sugli effetti positivi delle politiche di lockdown sull'ambiente sono analizzati per meglio comprendere la reale portata di alcune esternalità generate dagli attua-li modelli di produzione e consumo. A seguire, l'attenzione è quindi spostata sui primi contributi pubblicati sull'argomento dalla comunità internazionale degli studiosi di impresa e, con ciò, sull'iniziale strutturazione delle principali linee di pensiero riguardanti le conseguenze negative attese sul raggiungimento degli obiettivi di sostenibilità stabiliti in epoca pre-Covid-19.
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This brief offers five policy levers for a sustainable, just and resilient recovery that continues to catalyze the industry transition.
The lagoon of Venice has always been affected by the regional geomorphological evolution, anthropogenic stressors and global changes. Different morphological settings and variable biogeophysical conditions characterize this continuously evolving system that rapidly responds to the anthropic impacts. When the lockdown measures were enforced in Italy to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 infection on March 10th 2020, the ordinary urban water traffic around Venice, one of the major pressures in the lagoon, came to a halt. This provided a unique opportunity to analyse the environmental effects of restrictions to mobility on water transparency. Pseudo true-colour composites Sentinel-2 satellite imagery proved useful for qualitative visual interpretation, showing the reduction of the vessel traffic and their wakes from the periods before and during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. A quantitative analysis of suspended matter patterns, based on satellite-derived turbidity, in the absence of traffic perturbations, allowed to focus on natural processes and the residual stress from human activities that continued throughout the lockdown. We conclude that the high water transparency can be considered as a transient condition determined by a combination of natural seasonal factors and the effects of COVID-19 restrictions.
Government policies during the COVID-19 pandemic have drastically altered patterns of energy demand around the world. Many international borders were closed and populations were confined to their homes, which reduced transport and changed consumption patterns. Here we compile government policies and activity data to estimate the decrease in CO2 emissions during forced confinements. Daily global CO2 emissions decreased by –17% (–11 to –25% for ±1σ) by early April 2020 compared with the mean 2019 levels, just under half from changes in surface transport. At their peak, emissions in individual countries decreased by –26% on average. The impact on 2020 annual emissions depends on the duration of the confinement, with a low estimate of –4% (–2 to –7%) if prepandemic conditions return by mid-June, and a high estimate of –7% (–3 to –13%) if some restrictions remain worldwide until the end of 2020. Government actions and economic incentives postcrisis will likely influence the global CO2 emissions path for decades. COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns have altered global energy demands. Using government confinement policies and activity data, daily CO2 emissions have decreased by ~17% to early April 2020 against 2019 levels; annual emissions could be down by 7% (4%) if normality returns by year end (mid-June).
Microplastic debris is ubiquitous and yet sampling, classifying and enumerating this prolific pollutant in marine waters has proven challenging. Typically, waterborne microplastic sampling is undertaken using nets with a 333 μm mesh, which cannot account for smaller debris. In this study, we provide an estimate of the extent to which microplastic concentrations are underestimated with traditional sampling. Our efforts focus on coastal waters, where microplastics are predicted to have the greatest influence on marine life, on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean. Microplastic debris was collected via surface trawls using 100, 333 and 500 μm nets. Our findings show that sampling using nets with a 100 μm mesh resulted in the collection of 2.5-fold and 10-fold greater microplastic concentrations compared with using 333 and 500 μm meshes respectively (P < 0.01). Based on the relationship between microplastic concentrations identified and extrapolation of our data using a power law, we estimate that microplastic concentrations could exceed 3700 microplastics m⁻³ if a net with a 1 μm mesh size is used. We further identified that use of finer nets resulted in the collection of significantly thinner and shorter microplastic fibres (P < 0.05). These results elucidate that estimates of marine microplastic concentrations could currently be underestimated.
The majority of studies on absorptive capacity (AC) underscore the importance of absorbing technological knowledge from other firms to create economic value. However, to preserve moral legitimacy and create social value, firms must also discern and adapt to (shifts in) societal values. A comparative case study of eight firms in the food industry reveals how organizations prioritize and operationalize the societal value health in product innovation while navigating inter- and intravalue conflicts. The value-sensitive framework induced in this article extends AC by explaining how technically savvy, economic value–creating firms diverge in their receptivity, articulation, and reflexivity of societal values.
Time is divided by geologists according to marked shifts in Earth's state. Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Here we review the historical genesis of the idea and assess anthropogenic signatures in the geological record against the formal requirements for the recognition of a new epoch. The evidence suggests that of the various proposed dates two do appear to conform to the criteria to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964. The formal establishment of an Anthropocene Epoch would mark a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the Earth system.
This article examines the historically constituted dimensions of anthropocentrism. tracing the emergence of linear perspective. a camera theory of knowledge. and the human-nature dualism. These epistemological conventions are socially reproduced in organization science and management practice in their more contemporary anthropocentric forms: a disembodied form of technological knowing conjoined with an egocentric organizational orientation. Following this critique. the paradigmatic differences between anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches for dealing with issues related to the natural environment are discussed in what is referred to respectively as the environmental management and ecocentric responsibility paradigms. Our analysis suggests that corporate environmentalism and so-called ''greening-business'' approaches are grounded in the environmental management paradigm. It is argued that environmental management approaches are incommensurable with the ecocentric responsibility paradigm. The tensions between these competing paradigms are examined as a useful stimulus for theory development toward an ecocentric organizational paradigm.
This conceptual article examines the relationship between marketing and sustainability through the dual lenses of anthropocentric and ecocentric epistemology. Using the current anthropocentric epistemology and its associated dominant social paradigm, corporate ecological sustainability in commercial practice and business school research and teaching is difficult to achieve. However, adopting an ecocentric epistemology enables the development of an alternative business and marketing approach that places equal importance on nature, the planet, and ecological sustainability as the source of human and other species’ well-being, as well as the source of all products and services. This article examines ecocentric, transformational business, and marketing strategies epistemologically, conceptually and practically and thereby proposes six ecocentric, transformational, strategic marketing universal premises as part of a vision of and solution to current global un-sustainability. Finally, this article outlines several opportunities for management practice and further research.
The world is on the brink of an unprecedented growth-related ecological crisis that could well undermine prospects for global civilization. Nevertheless, the global community seems ‘in flight from thinking’ about the implications of the threat and unwilling to contemplate the policy remedies necessary to change the course of history. Biological and cultural factors combine to inhibit clear understanding and effective corrective action. Mainstream ‘solutions’ – hybrid cars, green buildings, smart growth, the new urbanism – are thus rooted in denial and delusional. These approaches do not address the fundamental problem of ‘overshoot’, but rather attempt to maintain the growth-bound status quo through efficiency gains and related technological ‘fixes’. This might actually worsen the situation. Achieving sustainability requires that such marginal reform give way to a complete rethink of society's relationship with nature. Developed societies need a new, more adaptive cultural mythology. The building sector arguably has greater material leverage in reducing the human ecological footprint than any other major industrial sector. Acceptance of the guidelines developed in this paper would revolutionize the industry and reorient it geographically. The question is: does the industry have the intellectual courage and practical momentum to assume a lead role in the sustainability campaign?
Le monde est au bord d'une crise écologique sans précédent, liée à la croissance, qui pourrait bien saper les perspectives d'avenir de la civilisation mondiale. Néanmoins, la communauté mondiale semble se refuser à penser aux implications de cette menace et ne pas se résoudre à envisager les remèdes politiques nécessaires pour modifier le cours de l'histoire. Les facteurs biologiques et culturels se conjuguent pour entraver une compréhension claire et la prise de mesures correctives efficaces. C'est la dénégation et l'illusion qui se trouvent ainsi être à l'origine des « solutions » dominantes – voitures hybrides, bâtiments verts, croissance intelligente, le nouvel urbanisme. Ces approches ne traitent pas du problème fondamental du « dépassement écologique » [des capacités productives de la Terre], mais tentent de maintenir le statu quo lié à la croissance grâce à des gains de rendement et aux « palliatifs » technologiques qui leur sont liés. Cela pourrait en fait aggraver la situation. Parvenir à un environnement durable nécessite qu'une réforme aussi minime cède le pas à une relation de la société à la nature totalement repensée. Les sociétés développées ont besoin d'une nouvelle mythologie culturelle, dotée d'une plus grande capacité d'adaptation. L'on peut soutenir que, s'agissant de réduire l'empreinte écologique de l'humanité, le secteur du bâtiment a une influence matérielle plus grande qu'aucun autre secteur industriel important. L'acceptation des directives développées dans cet article révolutionnerait l'industrie et la réorienterait géographiquement. La question est: l'industrie a-t-elle le courage intellectuel et le dynamisme pratique pour assumer un rôle leader dans la campagne en faveur d'un environnement durable?
Mots clés: comportement, cadre bâti, changement climatique, comportement cognitif, narrations culturelles, dépassement écologique, développement durable
Purpose
The paper aims to examine how trust interacts with factors affecting interorganizational knowledge sharing in green supply chains, where cooperation and competition coexist.
Design/methodology/approach
A new research model is developed which comprises nine constructs and 13 research hypotheses, with trust as a mediating construct. The nine constructs are measured by well‐supported measures in the literature. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from 288 major green manufacturing firms in Taiwan, using structural equation modeling.
Findings
The paper finds that trust is the pivot of the factors influencing interorganizational knowledge sharing. The more a factor contributes to trust positively (such as participation and communication) or negatively (such as opportunistic behavior), the more the factor contributes to knowledge sharing correspondingly. The factors with no significant influence on trust (such as shared values and learning capacity) have no or less influence on knowledge sharing.
Research limitations/implications
The empirical study is conducted on green supply chains, with data collected from Taiwan's green manufacturing firms. With the research model developed, cross‐industrial studies on various forms of supply chains can be conducted to investigate whether differences between supply chains exist about the role that trust plays in interorganizational knowledge sharing.
Practical implications
The findings of the paper provide useful insights into how supply chain members should reinforce their collaborative behaviors and activities that would enhance the trust‐based relationships, in order to achieve the competitive advantage of knowledge sharing for the supply chain as a whole.
Originality/value
The new research model developed allows the relationships between trust and other influencing factors on interorganizational knowledge sharing to be explored. The model reflects the coexistence of the cooperation and competition relationships between supply chain members, which is not dealt with in previous studies.
Proactive environmental strategies have been proposed as urgent, profitable and sustainable ways for firms to deal with the natural environment. This voluntary approach is said to pay off in terms of social reputation, customer preferences and generation of organisational capabilities. However, many managers and stakeholders are now finding that some proactive approaches may perpetuate or even increase environmental problems, while others have no clear payoffs. We propose a strategic framework identifying six categories of ‘myths’ - commonly accepted misunderstandings in the analysis, selection/implementation and control of proactive environmental strategies. These categories and specific problems are analysed in detail, and evidence presented in support of our arguments. We focus on the food industry, using secondary data of well-known (mostly American) multinational companies and a sample of 140 food factories in France and the United Kingdom. We conclude by suggesting that firms take a contingent view and generate a dynamic capability for a proactive environmental approach, rather than relying on universalistic implementation based on unreliable myths. We also make more explicit some general points about the relationships between business and society and the urgency of developing ‘real’ eco-sustainability measurements and strategies.
This study aims to shed light on how dynamic capabilities, i.e. sensing, seizing and reconfiguring, and their underlying organizational routines have an effect on innovation towards a greater degree of sustainability. Cross-sectional data from the Community Innovation Survey of German companies is used to test hypotheses with regard to this effect. Results from PLS-SEM analyses show that sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities all have a significant direct effect on innovation towards sustainability, with sensing activities playing the most prominent role. It is also found that reconfiguring capabilities positively influence sensing as well as seizing capabilities, and that sensing and seizing capabilities partially mediate the relationship between reconfiguring capabilities and companies’ sustainable innovation. This research extends the current literature by investigating how companies could build-up and shape their dynamic capabilities and organizational routines for sustainable innovation. To practice, it offers guidance concerning appropriate and important dynamic capabilities and organizational routines for innovating towards sustainability.
This article argues that the rapid evolution of expectations and influence capacity by corporate stakeholders requires managers in MNCs not only to adapt operating activities, but to rethink the purpose and overarching goal of the business enterprise, adapting it from a shareholder-primacy to a multi-stakeholder enterprise model. This complex adaptation process, however, requires the development of a specific form of competence to be developed and honed, different in kind from the typical capabilities focused on organizational change. With the help of concrete examples of sustainability-driven change initiatives, we discuss how the two enterprise models differ and how the development of this new type of competence facilitates the transition from one to the other. This article argues that the dynamic capabilities framework can be useful to study the evolutionary change processes that MNCs go through as they strive to innovate and adapt to societal pressures related to corporate sustainability. These pressures require MNCs to rethink and adapt core organizational elements and we argue that current dynamic capabilities theory is not sufficiently developed to explain these adaptive efforts. We suggest refining and extending theory in two directions: (1) distinguishing between behavioral, cognitive, and relational organizational elements as objects of the innovation, change, and learning dynamics; and (2) distinguishing between capabilities specific to generative variation and selection of innovative change and adaptation ideas from those specific to their diffusion and retention. Copyright
Despite environmental sustainability being identified as one of the key drivers of innovation, extant literature lacks a theoretically-sound and empirically-testable framework that can provide specific insights into green product innovation from a capabilities perspective. This study develops a theoretical framework from a sustainability-oriented dynamic capabilities (SODCs) perspective. We conceive SODCs as consisting of three underlying processes (external resource integration, internal resource integration, and resource building and reconfiguration) that influence the change/renewal of sustainability-oriented ordinary capabilities (SOOCs) (green innovation capability and eco-design capability). This study answers two key questions: which SODCs are needed to develop green innovation and eco-design capabilities? Which of these capabilities lead to better market performance of green products? We test a structural model linking SODCs to market performance in 189 Italian manufacturing firms. First, we find that the nature of the SODCs-performance link (direct or indirect) depends on the SODC type. Specifically, resource building and reconfiguration is the only SODC with a direct effect on market performance. Second, all three types of SODCs affect the eco-design capability, which mediates the link between SODCs and market performance. Third, we find that external resource integration is the only SODC affecting the green innovation capability, which mediates the link between external resource integration and market performance. Resource building and reconfiguration is the SODC with the overall (direct and indirect) highest impact on market performance. This study, among the first ones to consider capabilities for green product innovation under a dynamic capabilities perspective, provides implications for scholars, managers, and policy makers.
Building on the dynamic capabilities theory, a model of organizational capabilities driving an eco-based competitive advantage and performance in the global hotel industry is tested. Data obtained from 102 hotel chains reveal that organizational learning, shared vision, and cross-functional integration are conducive to creating a green competitive advantage, though this is not the case with relationship building and technology sensing/response. In turn, an eco-based advantage positively affects global financial performance. Certain dimensions of international strategy, namely foreign entry through joint ventures and decision-making decentralization, positively moderate the advantage–performance link, while no moderation effect exists for global market configuration and standardization/adaptation.
The multi-level perspective (MLP) has emerged as a fruitful middle-range framework for analysing socio-technical transitions to sustainability. The MLP also received constructive criticisms. This paper summarises seven criticisms, formulates responses to them, and translates these into suggestions for future research. The criticisms relate to: (1) lack of agency, (2) operationalization of regimes, (3) bias towards bottom-up change models, (4) epistemology and explanatory style, (5) methodology, (6) socio-technical landscape as residual category, and (7) flat ontologies versus hierarchical levels.
This paper draws on the social and behavioral sciences in an endeavor to specify the nature and microfoundations of the capabilities necessary to sustain superior enterprise performance in an open economy with rapid innovation and globally dispersed sources of invention, innovation, and manufacturing capability. Dynamic capabilities enable business enterprises to create, deploy, and protect the intangible assets that support superior long- run business performance. The microfoundations of dynamic capabilities—the distinct skills, processes, procedures, organizational structures, decision rules, and disciplines—which undergird enterprise-level sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capacities are difficult to develop and deploy. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial. They not only adapt to business ecosystems, but also shape them through innovation and through collaboration with other enterprises, entities, and institutions. The framework advanced can help scholars understand the foundations of long-run enterprise success while helping managers delineate relevant strategic considerations and the priorities they must adopt to enhance enterprise performance and escape the zero profit tendency associated with operating in markets open to global competition. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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