Navigating environmental sustainability in the corporate sector

Corporate environmental sustainability is experiencing a major surge in activity. The notion that capitalist enterprises can transform themselves to become more sustainable aligns with ecological modernization theory, which holds that our current economic system can become environmentally sustainable, especially through technological innovation. Organization scholars studying corporate environmental sustainability (CES) typically align with ecological modernization principles and focus their research on company-level norms and practices in order to suggest managerial improvements. Critical political economists, on the other hand, argue that capital accumulation and growth are fundamental drivers of environmental exploitation and that CES efforts are unlikely to yield significant results. We examine CES practices and experiences through a study of 51 in-depth interviews with sustainability professionals from the business sector. We focus on two questions: (1) whether respondents see tensions between profitability and environmentalism in their work and (2) how they envision squaring the growth imperative with planetary limits. We find that most CES work continues to fall within a business-case framework and that sustainability professionals do not regularly engage with the question of economic growth in their work. Responses indicate conflict between the profit imperative and environmental sustainability that suggest serious barriers to effective corporate sustainability. We interpret these constraints to be structurally produced and suggest that legal structures limit the extent to which the corporate sphere can be expected to achieve transformative environmental sustainability. We propose that future research examines corporate legal structures with an eye towards identifying potential levers for change.