Prelims

Half Title Page

Attaining the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal of Responsible Consumption and Production

Series Title Page

Family Businesses on a Mission

Series Editors:

Naomi Birdthistle

Rob Hales

The Family Businesses on Mission series examines how the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) can be applied in family businesses around the world, providing insights into cultural and societal differences and displaying innovative approaches to complex environmental and societal issues.

Title Page

Attaining the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal of Responsible Consumption and Production

Edited by

Naomi Birdthistle

Griffith University, Australia

And

Rob Hales

Griffith University, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2023

Editorial matter and selection © 2023 Naomi Birdthistle and Rob Hales.

Individual chapters © 2023 The Authors.

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited.

These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.

Open Access

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and is freely available to read online

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80455-843-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80455-840-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80455-842-3 (Epub)

List of Figures

List of Tables

About the Editors

Professor Naomi Birdthistle has entrepreneurship and family business running through her veins. She tried to work in her family business when she was four but was told she was too small. She came back year after year asking to work and eventually her grandmother capitulated and let her work in the family business when she was seven. After years of working in the family business part-time and having completed her studies at Stirling University, Babson College, Harvard University and the University of Limerick, Naomi established her own consulting business, consulting family businesses in her hometown. She is now a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation at Griffith University, teaching future family business leaders and researching family business issues as well. Naomi is an award-winning academic having received numerous awards for her teaching and her research.

Associate Professor Robert Hales is the discipline leader for Sustainable Business and Management in the Department of Business Strategy and Innovation. His research interests focus on the governance issues around the grand challenges of our time. His research focuses on SDGs in business and government, a business case for climate change, climate change policy, carbon management, sustainable tourism and working with First Peoples on consent processes and climate change. He created and was the first programme director of Griffith University’s Master of Global Development. He teaches in the Department of Business Strategy and Innovation and has convened master’s level courses such as Leadership for Sustainable Business, Research Methods for Policy Makers and Sustainability and Systems Thinking. He supervises PhD students in the areas of collaborative governance, sustainability transitions and climate change.

About the Contributors

Adrian Ade is a Doctoral student at HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration in Hamburg as well as at Andrássy University in Budapest. Simultaneously, Adrian works in the field of business and corporate development of a German ship-owning company. His research focus is on non-financial goals in family firms as well as strategic management. He holds a bachelor's degree in Business Administration and a master's degree in International Management.

Dr Allan Discua Cruz is a member of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business and Director of the Centre for Family Business at Lancaster University Management School (United Kingdom). His current research interests relate to entrepreneurship by families in business. He has published in journals such as Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research and International Small Business Journal among others. He has recently co-edited books around the topics of the family firm group phenomenon and family firms in Latin America. He is currently involved in research projects related to family businesses in the coffee industry.

Dr Stefan Kemp is engaged in lectures and research projects at the HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration. He contributes to family business courses and acts as a thesis advisor. Stefan draws managerial family business experience from leadership positions in strategy consulting, international marketing and key-account management.

Peter Klein is Professor of Family Business at the HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration and is responsible for IMF Institute for Mittelstand and Family Firms in Hamburg. He has extensive management experience in family businesses and is a board member of the Nissen Foundation.

Dr Poh Yen Ng is Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University. She holds a PhD in Management from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and is currently a Senior Fellow of Advance HE in the United Kingdom. Poh Yen grew up in a family business and ran an education franchise with her husband in Malaysia back in the 2000s. She then ventured into academia to pass on her business experiences to university students. This later motivated her into developing a research passion for entrepreneurship, particularly the family business. Her research outputs cover many areas within the entrepreneurship and family business discipline including the following: influence of socio-emotional wealth in the family business, empowerment process, and social network dynamics of women entrepreneurs, and environmental practices of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Markus Pillmayer is a Professor of Destination Management and Destination Development at the Department of Tourism at the Munich University of Applied Sciences. His research focusses on spatial development which he has explored in several contexts including citizen participation, health and sustainability. In the context of his PhD – funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – he dealt with the internationalisation processes of the tourism industry in the Arab world. He can draw on many years of experience in the international tourism industry and tourism policy, which also benefits him in the context of his scientific activities. In addition, he is a fellow of various scientific associations such as IGU (International Geographic Union) and the DGT (German Association for Tourism Research) where he serves on the board.

Stefan Prigge is a Professor of Finance and Accounting at HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration and a member of the IMF Institute for Mittelstand and Family Firms in Hamburg, Germany. His major fields of interest are governance and finance which he has applied to family firms (since 2011) and professional sports (since 2014). In family firm research, he published research about listed family firms, corporate governance codes for family firms, private equity in family firms, and family constitutions. In 2017 he initiated together with Holger Fleischer, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Private Law, Hamburg, the Hamburg Conference: Law and Management of Family Firms, an annual international and interdisciplinary research conference.

Eric Schlichter was the Head of SHEQ Special Logistics & Manager Group Sustainability Forum at HOYER Group in Hamburg before leaving the company in April 2023 to start his own company Schlichter Consulting. He is a member of DGQ German Society for Quality and of the FQS e.V. Research Association for Quality e.V. Within the FQS he holds the position of a reviewer on the Research Advisory Board. His major field of interest is the implementation and maintenance of ISO standard requirements, as well as other industry standards such as the recently successfully implemented OCS Operation Clean Sweep within the HOYER-owned tank cleaning stations and relevant warehousing locations where plastics are handled. As an expert in safe working practices, he also focusses on the implementation of measures which make the workers’ life safer and healthier. In addition to this, he teaches quality management systems as a freelance lecturer at the Elbcampus Hamburg with a focus on risk and opportunity planning, continuous improvement process and auditing. He is part of the examination committee for this area.

Ian Steel is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Lancaster University Management School and a Member of the Pentland Centre. Ian has been on the first cohorts of a number of programmes including: The Family Business Productivity Programme, with his son Maitland, The Lancashire Forum, The Global Eco-Innovation Forum. He is currently sitting on an Eco-I Taskforce to challenge and recommend ways the SME Food & Drink sector in Lancashire can achieve Net Zero Carbon by 2030. In his award-winning blog, one of the Top 40 Coffee Blogs on the Planet, he writes about his Travels to Origin to source traceable coffees that develop into long-term relationships with family farms. He works in ‘Speciality’ coffee from farm gate to coffee cup and has built Atkinsons into a much-loved brand made up of a Shop and Roastery, four Cafés, a Wholesale B2B and online business.

Foreword

Prof. Walter Leal Filho (PhD, DSc, DPhil, DTech, DEd)

Chair, Inter-University Sustainable Development Research Programme

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015 provide a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.

They also entail elements of importance towards a strategic business engagement with sustainability issues. These offer a framework that provides businesses with a systematic approach to identifying new business opportunities while contributing to the solution of the grand sustainability challenges facing the world today, including climate change. Each SDG, if achieved, will have a direct and significant positive impact on millions of people's lives around the world and the environment in which they live. Businesses have an opportunity to widen the purpose of business by adopting the SDGs as targets for their operations. Thus, they can make a meaningful contribution to the greater good by achieving their operational objectives.

Family businesses are uniquely placed to contribute to SDGs for many reasons. Firstly, family business models have longer time perspectives, which allows the family business to link with the longer-term SDG time frame – 2030. Secondly, family businesses often focus on aspects of business operation that do not have an immediate return on investment such as relationship building with stakeholder groups. Thirdly, family businesses tend to rate the importance of ethics higher than standard businesses and thus align well with the social dimensions of the SDGs. Lastly, family businesses have intergenerational perspectives which is a core principle of sustainability.

This book provides insights into how family business operationalises SDG#12: Responsible Consumption and Production. The book uses a rigorous case study approach for family businesses to detail aspects of their business that help to advance responsible consumption and production. The cases provided here are living proof that family businesses that operate for the greater good actually work! Non-family businesses can take a leaf out of the family businesses portrayed in this book as they can provide different perspectives on how businesses can successfully align SDGs and business strategies.

Despite many businesses having adopted environmental social governance strategies and environmental management systems, the effect of this activity has not been reflected in a healthier planet. Many ‘state of the environment’ reports indicate that planetary health is decreasing, and planetary boundaries are being crossed or are about to be crossed. Whilst the cause of this decline is not entirely the fault of the business, there still needs to be a greater effort to address the decline. The challenge for family businesses is to use their unique characteristics and set ambitious work programmes that contribute to achieving global goals. This book provides insights into how family businesses can achieve such a mission and how non-family businesses can be inspired to do the same.

Acknowledgements

The Editors would like to thank the contributors of the book for providing insights and sharing learnings from their business practice. We acknowledge that writing up cases in the format required considerable time and effort. The quality of the cases presented is testament to their efforts.

The Editors would also like to thank Emerald Publishing for supporting the publication of this book and the mission for deeper sustainability through utilising the SDGs.

The authors of the case Klinglwirt would like to thank Sonja Obermeier, owner, for her time, support, and valuable insights into the Klinglwirt. In addition, they would like to thank their student assistant Patrizia Pluskota (Bachelor Tourism Management), who gave them extraordinary support in the preparation of this case study and thus also contributed to the students' perspective.

The author of the Bewley's case would like to thank Mr David Turney for participating in the interview and sharing Bewley's sustainability reports.