Transdisciplinary research in corporate sustainability: vision, verdict, value

Professor Stefan Schaltegger, Chair of Corporate Sustainability Management, Head of the Centre for Sustainability Management, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany

Biography

From 2006–2011, Dr Schaltegger was the vice-president research and delegate of Leuphana University of Lüneburg. He has been an assistant professor for economics at the Center of Economics and Business Administration of the University of Basel, Switzerland, in charge of the department of Public Economics and Policy for two years, and a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Economics and the School of Business Administration at the University of Washington.

His research areas include corporate sustainability management and corporate environmental management, particularly environmental information management, environmental and sustainability accounting and reporting, operative and strategic environmental management, and sustainable entrepreneurship. He is also interested in strategic and stakeholder management, and the integration of management and economics.

Abstract
‘Un-sustainability’ represents an array of quite different complex problems, which require new research, analysis and solution-finding approaches. Transdisciplinarity is developing as the mainstream set of research approaches of sustainability science(s). Most transdisciplinary publications and projects investigate global syndromes or large-scale cases of un-sustainability (e.g. the greenhouse effect, diminishing quality and availability of drinking water, desertification, slums in megacities). Although companies are frequently addressed, they mostly only play an indirect role in this research.
Management research tends to deal with corporate sustainability either from a theoretical, mostly disciplinary perspective (often criticising managers for the damage they cause and for not already having solved all problems), or by conducting applied projects addressing very focused issues of energy efficiency, environmental management systems, fair trade marketing, and so on. Corporate practitioners are often interested in practical, easy to implement consulting-type solutions, but not so much in complex, broad analyses. Transdisciplinarity, although sometimes addressed and even applied in sustainability management research, is far from being influential or integrated in (sustainability) management research and corporate practice.
Given that sustainable development of the economy and society cannot be achieved without the sustainable development of companies, this presentation discusses different transdisciplinarity approaches that are emerging in the area of corporate sustainability and CSR. Obstacles for the application of existing transdisciplinary research methods are analysed and conclusions drawn for the development of transdisciplinary research approaches in sustainability management research.