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With apologies for cross-posting:

We are calling for the caucus meeting during the Academy of Management 2010 meeting in Montreal on the topic "The Strategic Imperative of Sustainability". This caucus will bring together scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in operationalizing sustainability throughout management practices, free of any theoretic or discipline specific orthodoxy. We are particularly interested in elaborating on interdisciplinary approaches that will promote sustainability as integral to the strategic imperatives of managing organizations. We hope to provide a forum that enables researchers and practitioners to interact and discuss future research initiatives that integrate environmental concerns within a pragmatic managerial model.

Presently, there seems to be very little consensus about the role and scope of sustainability initiatives in the management of organizations. While triple bottom line and ESG measures have their advocates, regulatory requirements and institutional standards have lagged.

Most classic economic management approaches consider sustainability to be a cost for organizations and incidental to the 'business of business'. While the societal and activist approaches (including the natural resource based view) consider business as an integral part of society and thus obligated to deal with social and environmental issues. The gap between these approaches also seems to be widening, fuelled by the rhetoric of the different management disciplines.  Whether we have reached a Schumpeter moment or whether realignment of current practices can bring about desired results remains to be seen, yet provokes strong adverse responses all around.

We propose to initiate a dialogue to bring together researchers and practitioners across disciplines, who thereafter could develop an interdisciplinary research agenda to holistically address the issues and attempt to integrate theory and practices to further our evolution towards a sustainable society. This caucus recognizes the inherent importance of sustainability to all business strategy in the years to come.  We seek to reconceptualize organizations to fully integrate sustainability considerations into the core strategy around which managerial decisions are taken.

To this effect, we have set up a web group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/strategy-sustainability/?yguid=82480175) that will commence the conversations amongst those interested in the topic, and we hope to bring together the discussion threads during the caucus meeting at Montreal. NBS (Network for Business Sustainability) supports this initiative to bring together international researchers and practitioners engaged in furthering sustainability initiatives, and the discussion forum will migrate to their website (http://www.nbs.net) after the caucus to allow the caucus members to continue their collaborative efforts.

All those interested in being part of this caucus are requested to inform the organizers (sujitsur@dal.ca and CA_TetraultSirsly@carleton.ca) and thereafter upload their discussion query on the yahoo webgroup.

Look forward to meeting you in Montreal!

Carol-Ann Tetrault Sirsly & Sujit Sur