Sustainability, Stakeholders and Business

In our viewpoint, “corporate sustainability” represents the turning point, which allows transforming the firm from a mere means for making profit into “the most creative human experiment that aims at improving life” (Csikszentmihaly, 2003). Embracing sustainability opens up new ways to create harmonious and consonant relationships between the firm and all its stakeholders, relationships based on a vision going beyond ourselves by looking for the highest shared benefit in order to build a better world. Such a vision interprets profit as the residual value derived from the production and diffusion of wellbeing created by the firm in a long-term action perspective in which corporate value and societal value will be aligned (KPMG International, 2014). The goal of this special issue is to encourage, develop, and expand discussions regarding how sustainability is developed and maintained in business organizations with a particular emphasis on the application of various strategies, tactics, techniques and tools arising from research on the evolving approaches and concepts of sustainability.