Organisational strategies for sustainable development : developing a research agenda for the new millennium

Environmental issues have been on the agendas of industry and academia for nearly thirty years. While the bulk of this research has focused on environmental sustainability, the late 1990s saw a broadening of the scope of this field of inquiry to include social, environmental and economic sustainability. This paper discusses the emergence of organisational strategies for sustainable development and their implications for management theory and practice. While the relationship between humans and the natural environment has been theorized in a variety of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology and economics, theory development on organizational strategies for sustainability is still in its nascent stage. There is a strong normative and ethical current in theories of organizations and the natural environment, and there are plenty of prescriptions as to what organizations should do to protect the environment. The emergence of environmental issues and their implications for strategy are discussed, and the theoretical and practical implications of integrating environmental and social issues into corporate strategies are briefly discussed.