Business and Sustainability

Climate change, the resource constrained economy, and sustainability in general are amongst the hottest and most problematic topics in contemporary business today. Increasingly, new enterprises are being established to address key twenty-first century environmental challenges, incumbent industries are implementing new strategies to comply with stringent legislation to retain their licenses, and multi-nationals are endeavouring to link tackling issues from poverty to deforestation to their bottom line.

This textbook is one of the first to offer students a comprehensive overview of how the world's sustainability challenges are affecting, and being affected by business, and has been written specifically to cater for the growing number of courses and modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels focused on sustainability in the business context. The author adopts a mix of practitioner and theoretical perspectives and offers an insightful review of the subject across three core areas: the global business context, business management and ownership, and the external environment. Each of these areas contains chapters on particular aspects of sustainability and management, and draws from a range of global case studies and exercises. This textbook serves as a concise summary of contemporary sustainability issues for lecturers and students wanting a single resource on the subject.

About the Author

Michael Blowfield is a Fellow at LBS and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment where he researches business transformation in an era of climate change and resource constrained economies. He has worked as an academic and consultant in the field of corporate social and environmental responsibility with a particular focus on the socio-political context of corporate responsibility, and the role of business in society. Building on extensive experience in international development, including living and working in twenty different countries, he began a critical examination of corporate responsibility in global supply chains in the late 1990s. He was principal investigator and programme manager for a portfolio of government and corporate-funded projects that analyzed the field of corporate responsibility in the context of developing countries.