Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 25, 2014

Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting

The Environment and Textbooks: Are They Enabling Sustainable Outcomes?

A central claim within the sustainable development literature is that realizing sustainable outcomes requires a move away from a conceptualization of the environment as a separate, bounded, independently given entity. In this paper, the conceptualization of the environment within bestselling strategy textbooks in the UK and Australia in 2011 is reviewed. A focus on strategy textbooks is taken as it is argued that corporate strategists are key actors in the realization of sustainable outcomes. Thus the constructs those individuals may learn from texts are potentially key to their ability to realize sustainable outcomes. The findings show that the constructs in the textbooks offer a sclerotic, dehumanized view of the environment that is partitioned into external and internal categories by an organizational boundary. Thus if strategy textbooks are tools to help corporate strategists learn strategy, who will then enable sustainable development, changes are required.