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Legitimacy and Organizational Sustainability

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Abstract

The literature regarding social and environmental sustainability of business focuses primarily on rationales for adopting sustainability strategies and operational practices in support of that goal. In contrast, we examine sustainability from a perspective that has received far less research attention—attitudes that inform managerial decision-making. We develop a conceptual model that identifies six elemental categories of attitudes that can be held independently or aggregated to yield a meta-attitude representing the legitimacy of sustainability. Our model distinguishes among three types of internally held attitudes and externally perceived subjective norms: pragmatic, moral, and cognitive. We propose a refinement of Ajzen’s (In: Kuhl J, Beckmann J (eds) Action control: from cognition to behavior, 1985; Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 50:179–211, 1991) Theory of planned behavior (TPB) that incorporates these sub-categories of personal attitudes and subjective norms. Practical implications are discussed including how organizations considering adopting sustainability programs might use the model as a conceptual tool to help achieve and assess program success.

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  1. College of Business, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA

    Tom E. Thomas & Eric Lamm

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Thomas, T.E., Lamm, E. Legitimacy and Organizational Sustainability. J Bus Ethics 110, 191–203 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1421-4

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