Abstract

Company decision makers constantly face the competing demands of business and sustainability. Although chief executive officers (CEOs) are the main actors responsible for ensuring overall company performance and addressing multiple competing demands, few studies have explored their understanding of business and sustainability and how these understandings relate to tensions and tension handling. The present study uses a discursive approach to analyse CEO interview data and identifies three distinct discourses—instrumental, normative and transformative discourses—through which the CEOs construct corporate sustainability. These discourses occur simultaneously and result in different tensions and tension management strategies. By offering an approach for examining individual CEOs' corporate sustainability constructions alongside tension construction and management in their contexts, this study contributes to the literature on tensions in corporate sustainability. The simultaneous presence of contradictory yet intertwined discourses illustrates how CEOs respond to complexity related to corporate sustainability, including multiple strategic objectives, diverse stakeholder demands and associated tensions. The discourses also reveal how CEOs' language use fosters or hinders corporate sustainability actions and determines who and what is taken into consideration. The findings related to the CEOs' transformative discourse introduced in this paper demonstrate such constructions that have potential to address and transcend competing business and sustainability demands.