Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that five teaching cases have recently been
published that put students in the shoes of managers who have to deal with
the full complexity of sustainability-related trade-offs.
The cases focus on strategic decisions of companies related to, for
instance, moral standards in an international development context, choosing
a sustainable product label, the role of growth and profits for a company,
greening markets through niche versus mass market approaches, and the
evaluation of different production-related environmental effects.
The case studies were published in a Special Issue of the journal
“Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management” (Volume 19,
Issue 2, March/April 2012, see
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/csr.v19.2/issuetoc ).
(On behalf of Monika Winn and Jonatan Pinkse)
Sincerely,
Lydia Illge
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DETAILS
The aim of the Special issue, guest edited by Monika Winn, Jonatan Pinkse
and Lydia Illge, is to provide learning tools to help train students to
make trade-offs between economic, social and environmental objectives at
corporate, societal and environmental levels, taking into account both
short- and long-term issues.
The first case study in this issue – Fordlandia: Corporate citizenship or
corporate colonialism – presents a challenge Ford Motor Company was facing
in the late 1920s. Using an historical approach to the case study of Ford’s
attempts to set up a rubber plantation in the Amazon basin, Ralf Barkemeyer
and Frank Figge show how the detailed knowledge of local cultures (or lack
thereof) turned out to be pivotal in furthering the firm’s social
sustainability strategy. The dilemmas exposed in this case appear as valid
and pressing today as it was then: where does doing good turn into forcing
one’s own norms and values unjustly onto others?
The second case study – Towards a sustainable coffee market? Paradoxes
faced by a multinational company –, also with an international business
focus, refers to a very current situation: it focuses on market dynamics
for sustainable coffee. In her case, Ans Kolk discusses the problems of
Dutch food retailer Sara Lee and its strategy to expand the market for
sustainable coffee. The central questions of the case are: Should the
company prioritize a consistent international strategy and stick with the
Utz label it found to be effective for introducing sustainable coffee into
mainstream markets? Or should it go along with the Dutch government and
redirect its strategy to fair trade?
While the first two cases exemplify challenges faced by large multinational
companies, the third case study – The journey of a ‘green’
micro-enterprise: The Green Planet – looks at the smallest company
possible: a micro-enterprise. In her case about The Green Planet Store,
Diane Holt shows the struggle of a green entrepreneur in dealing with the
competition from green products mainstreaming into supermarkets and other
large mainstream outlets. As the micro-enterprise is privately owned and
managed, the choices and trade-offs made by the entrepreneur were between
staying close to her personal values and creating a most profitable
business.
The fourth case study – Strategies for sustainable cotton: Comparing niche
with mainstream markets – also deals with the particular challenges of a
relatively small player, but contrasts this with those of a large
multinational company. In their case about the market for organic cotton,
Lydia Illge and Lutz Preuss compare and contrast the challenges of the
Swedish retailer H&M with those of the much smaller German niche player
hessnatur, using the analogy of greening Goliaths versus greening Davids.
The authors also raise the question as to which company has the greater
positive sustainability impact.
In the final case study in this special issue – Assessing trade-offs in
investments for the environment: The case of a VOC-reduction investment at
AUTO Group –, Tobias Hahn, Frank Figge and Andrea Liesen use the example of
an automobile company to present a method for evaluating trade-offs between
different environmental features of investments. The question raised by the
authors is how to make meaningful trade-off decisions between different
additional environmental improvements that go along with two alternative
production technologies for reducing VOC emissions. Using traditional
capital assessment tools, the method effectively translates the
environmental improvements into monetary terms.
The case study ideas were developed at a workshop held by SEABUS, an
international research network on social and environmental aspects in
business and management (www.seabus-research.net), funded by the German
Ministry for Education and Research (grant number 01UT1005).
**************************************************
--
Lydia Illge
IZT
Institut für Zukunftsstudien und Technologiebewertung
Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment
Schopenhauerstrasse 26
14129 Berlin
Germany
E-Mail:
l.illge@izt.de
Tel: +49 30 - 80 30 88 34
Fax: +49 30 - 80 30 88 88
Internet:
www.izt.de
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