Christine Vallaster - Böcker

The way organizations manage entrepreneurship has changed dramatically over the past decade. Today, organizations take account of economic issues, but they also adopt a broader perspective of their purpose including social and environmental issues (i.e. sustainability). Yet, despite its global spread, sustainable entrepreneurship remains an uncertain and poorly defined ambition with few absolutes.This book reaffirms the important need to improve comprehension and explore the subtleties of how individuals, groups, and organizations can discover, create, and seize opportunities for blended value generation, by designing and operating sustainable ventures. It examines, in an interdisciplinary fashion and across sectoral and geographical boundaries, how entrepreneurial activities can be developed to be generally consistent with sustainable development goals, as well as by whom, for what reasons, and with what implications. The Editors comprehensively review key dimensions of the sustainable entrepreneurship phenomenon to establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. The 19 chapters cover 4 main topics: Understanding the intentions and motivations for sustainable entrepreneurship Fostering and enacting sustainability through entrepreneurial action Leading and inspiring sustainable entrepreneurial action Finding the contextually grounded implications of and challenges to sustainable entrepreneurship and blended value generation This book is an important resource for entrepreneurs and policy makers as well as students in the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation, and sustainability.

Efforts to establish the measurement and control of sustainability have produced notable tools, but those instruments lack applicability in practice. Increasing the level of standardization of such tools also seems difficult to achieve, because the contexts surrounding the focal organizations differ considerably. Therefore, what we need is a systematic, interdisciplinary assessment of how to measure and control sustainability, so that we can establish an essential definition and up-to-date picture of the field. Measuring and Controlling Sustainability attempts to provide such an assessment in 17 chapters, organized into four main topic sections: (a) organizations and social value creation: concepts, responsibilities, and barriers; (b) accounting, measurement, performance, and diffusion of social value; (c) practical and managerial insights from real-life cases; and (d) choices, incentives, guidance, and ethics.This research anthology provides a comprehensive collection of cutting-edge theories and research that will further the development and advancement of measuring and controlling sustainable efforts in theory and managerial practice.

Engaging with Stakeholders: A Relational Perspective on Responsible Business contends that meaningful and constructive stakeholder engagement efforts should be rooted in a deep relational process of shared understanding, expectations, and viewpoints, through honest, continued dialogue between stakeholders and company management. This anthology follows and reaffirms this view, which also establishes the increasing need to explore the subtleties of how companies can respectfully engage their stakeholders in ways that reflect the corporate strategy and contribute to the ongoing development of business activities and creation of value, for themselves and stakeholders, from social, environmental, and economic perspectives.Stakeholder engagement practices, however, remain highly complex and difficult to manage; their ability to generate value in an inclusive way requires critical consideration. Sound stakeholder engagement efforts also constitute a keystone for responsible business activities.Drawing on a wide range of literature and studies, this book addresses key dimensions of stakeholder engagement, through a responsible business lens, and thereby contributes to identifying the opportunities, challenges, and key organizational implications associated with their unfolding. The four main topics covered are:• Delineating the nature and multiple raisons d’être of stakeholder engagement• Dialogical and communicational foundations of stakeholder engagement• Engaging with diverse stakeholders throughout the value chain• Reaping organizational returns and relational rewards of stakeholder engagement efforts