An Investigation into the corporate sustainability strategies and practices in India

Abstract

In the face of environmental degradation, over-exploitation of natural resources, global warming, social inequality, loss of biodiversity, energy scarcity, the societies have become more and more apprehensive on the long-term effect of the industrial growth in the life of the ordinary people, other living creatures, and the ecology. The idea of sustained economic growth amalgamated within the principles of ecological and social responsibility, extended to the level of individual firms, highlights corporate sustainability (Bansal, 2005). In India, the recent participation and ratification of Government in Paris Agreement in December 2015 to balance its carbon emissions with its economic growth objectives by reducing its carbon footprint by 33-35% from its 2005 levels within 2030 has hightened the importance of environmental sustainability practices in the context of the Indian businesses. Furthermore, the notification of Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs on Section 135 and Schedule VII of the Companies Act 2013 has made a minimum 2% of the net profit investment on corporate social responsibility practices for specific Indian listed firms mandatory, which is expected to change the dynamics of the scenario substantially. In this situation, an increasing number of firms, globally as well as in India, have shown their interest to enhance the deployment of resources towards executing corporate sustainability practices in environmental, social, and economic causes. Notwithstanding, the scholarly research on corporate sustainability strategies is still in a bit of puzzled state due to the difficulty of defining sustainable development in a business context and the degree to which the concept has resulted in a proliferation of terminology. This proliferation may make scholars wary of attempting to create constructs to test elements of firms sustainable development strategies. The result, however, is that academic research is failing to inform management practice in this increasingly important arena (Hart and Dowell, 2011: 1470). The dominant research outputs from the management scholars on the subject are, subsequently, primarily anecdotal, descriptive and normative. These researchers, in general, do not provide the clarity to understand the motivations of corporate sustainability strategies except few notable exceptions where the researchers have endeavored to develop hypotheses and validate with the help of large-scale data from industries (e.g., Russo and Fouts, 1997; Sharma and Vredenburg, 1998; Klassen and Whybark, 1999; Sharma, 2000), either related to corporate environmental sustainability strategy or corporate social sustainability strategy. Therefore, the research on corporate sustainability strategies needs the theoretical clarity as well as the empirical support to understand the variation of the firms in adopting corporate sustainability strategies and practices.