Linking Sustainability aspects to sustainability strategies insights from a leading Sri Lankan conglomerate

Abstract

Corporate Sustainability has gained a lot of attention in the business world as concerns over the environmental and social issues are on the rise. Adopting corporate sustainable practices not only benefit society at large but also benefits corporates in different ways. Further corporate sustainability practices can be identified in three pillars as economic, ecological and social. Sustainability strategies are the means of which the sustainable practices can be adopted successfully. Therefore, successful implementation of sustainability strategies is important. However, there is a dearth of studies conducted in studying how the sustainable practices are implemented through sustainability strategies, this study using the sustainability aspects and strategies developed by Baumgartner & Ebner, (2010), attempts to identify how sustainability practices have been adopted using the sustainability strategies. Following the case study method, an award winning leading conglomerate in Sri Lanka was selected for the study and its annual reports for five years were analyzed through a content analysis. Findings suggest that among the three aspects, least attended aspect is social sustainability while economic and ecological sustainability practices are satisfactorily adopted. Also the findings suggest that the company has used conservative sustainability strategy as the majority of sustainable practices adopted are mainly focused on profitability.