%0 Articles
%T A quest for corporate sustainability in forest-based industry: a resource-based perspective
%A Li, Ning
%D 2012
%J Dissertationes Forestales
%V 2012
%N 150
%R doi:10.14214/df.150
%U http://dissertationesforestales.fi/article/1936
%X Growing interest in corporate sustainability has translated into growing concerns about how corporate responsibility management can be more effectively integrated with economic business goals, challenging organizations to shift their priorities toward more holistic strategies and performance assessment models which encompass measures related to both multiple stakeholders and responsibilities. Although interactions between corporate (social) strategy, sustainability performance, and business competitiveness have received considerable attention in both theory and practice over the past three decades, the phenomenon is under-investigated in forest-based industry, which is undergoing broad structural changes and global shifts in market demand and supply.

This dissertation aims to fill this gap by approaching it from the resource-based view of the firm and empirically investigating a variety of aspects in an attempt to provide an overview of state-of-the-art corporate sustainability in global forest-based industry and to capture a structured view of the relationships between sustainability performance, competitiveness and economic performance among forest-based companies.

The results indicate that both larger and small forest-based companies seem to have clear stakeholder orientations. Driven by legal requirements aspects, small companies tend to adopt informal corporate responsibility strategies and tools to meet their stakeholder expectations. A majority of large forest industry companies appear to have implemented corporate responsibility mainly with a profit-maximizing assumption and a relatively defensive approach parallel to and beyond their core business. To these large companies, environmental and economic issues are dominant in disclosure and profitability, while regional differences are not decisive in formulating strategies for sustainability reporting. Furthermore, the results bolster previous findings that have reported a positive return on corporate responsibility initiatives in terms of profitability, suggesting that corporate responsibility can enhance value creation for forest-based companies. To that end, a differentiated business-oriented approach is necessary in managing the business case for sustainability.