Corporate Sustainability Management in the Energy Sector

1 Introduction (S. 1-2)

1.1 Research field

The history of corporate social responsibility and other related concepts can be traced way back to ancient Mesopotamia and Greece (and probably even further), where businessmen were punished for negligence that harmed workers and the general public. However, it is obvious that the industrial revolution at the end of the 19th cen tury substantially increased the significance of businesses and thus also their scope to behave more or less responsibly within society. Because there was no legislation in this area at that time, history mentions several businessmen who postulated that business should serve society and took corresponding initiatives (Balza & Radojicic, 2004, Wren, 1979). With the emergence of labor unions and legislation (on minimum wages, disability compensation etc.), the concept of the social responsibility of the businessman gained importance over the following decades.

After World War II, social concerns were increasingly incorporated into management education and legislation (foremost social security systems). Between 1960 and 1980, rapid economic growth and its social and environmental effects (including incidents such as e.g. Aberfan, Wales in 1966 and Seveso, Italy in 1976) triggered several initia tives such as the Club of Rome and the Brandt Report as well as new regulatory standards in industrialized countries, e.g. the US Environmental Protection Act (Mohan, 2003).

Obviously the growing acceptance of businesses' social and environmental responsi bility was intensively discussed among scholars and practitioners. The best known contribution to this debate is undoubtedly Milton Friedman's claim that "few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundation of our free society as the accep tance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible" (Friedman, 1962). Consequently scholars increasingly built a stronger and more logically grounded case for corporate social responsibility (CSR). For example Johnson (1971) presented several views of social responsibility, among them utility maximization (rather than profit maximization) as the prime motivation of companies. He postulated that socially responsible managers maximize utility by extending their interest beyond their own well being to their fel low employees and citizens.

In the 1980s and 1990s a plethora of further definitions and frameworks were devel oped and refined (Arlow & Gannon, 1982, Carroll, 1999, Davenport, 2000, Moir, 2001). Furthermore, the notion of sustainable development, initially defined in the Brundtland Report by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), gained more and more importance. However, the inflated use of terms such as corporate social responsibility, corporate sustainability and corporate citizenship led to significant skepticism and cynicism, particularly in civil society.

So far empirical research essentially only produced a plethora of instrumental studies yielding inconclusive evidence for a sound business case, and failed to describe cor porate sustainability management (CSM) and its economic rationale comprehen sively (Griffin & Mahon, 1997, Morsing, 2003).1 In particular, sector specific and comparative approaches are missing although the contingent character of CSM and related concepts such as social responsiveness was diagnosed as early as the 1970s (Arlow et al., 1982, p. 235, Carroll, 1979, Sethi, 1975). Understandably skepticism has not ebbed away (Walley & Whitehead, 1994).