Sustainable RSM Academic Coordinator, Dr. Frank Wijen has an article “Trade-offs in the Adoption of Sustainability Standards” in the 9 November Huffington Post Business blog.
Dr. Wijen, Associate Professor of Strategic Management in the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University is a board member of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability network (a partnership among academic institutions created to provide data and networking opportunities to facilitate research on corporate sustainability).
In the article he asks, “How sustainable is sustainability? Some people might ask this question ironically, drawing attention to the lack of a standard definition of a word. It can mean quite different things to different people in different industry sectors and geographies, and even to people working in the same field but on opposite sides of the fence.”
In Professor Wijen’s published paper in the Academy of Management he begins the exploration by emphasizing, "Means versus ends in opaque institutional fields: trading off compliance and achievement in sustainability standard adoption" stresses, inter alia, that standard creators perceive a clear need to design sustainability standards in such a way that their adopters fully understand and live up to the underlying principles and rules of such standards...”
Read the full article here.
View a video-clip of Dr.Wijen speaking about his research here.