Sustainability and Sustainable Development: an approach towards Durable Corporation

Sustainability is one of the most used words in relation to the business activity and reporting at present. Businesses today are experiencing profound pressure to reform & improve the shareholder related practices and to assess their impacts on shareholders and the national environment. Today companies in a broad sense, a group of different agents that have a relationship with shareholders, citizens, providers & customers. In other words, they are known as stakeholders. The stakeholder view emphasized that the linkages between the corporation and its multiple constituencies are in many ways important vehicles for creating, sustaining, and enhancing the corporation's wealth-creating capacity. Introducing the concept of sustainability into organizational thinking has implications for business strategy, which, in turn, affects how firms measure performance. ‘Sustainability’ can mean many different things to organizations. Indeed, many organizations do not distinguish between environment and sustainability while other organizations equate sustainability with economic sustainability, that is, with consistent levels of economic growth (Bansal, 2002).To achieve sustainable development it is necessary to achieve sustainability and this can be achieved by four actions: maintaining economic activity as this is the raison d’être of the company (Friedman 1970); conserving the environment as this is essential for the maintenance of future generations; ensuring social justice which includes elimination of poverty and the ensuring of human rights; and developing spiritual and cultural values, where the corporate and societal values align in the individual (Aras and Crowther 2009).