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Since the Brundtland report’s call for sustainability, planetary conditions have deteriorated. This paper suggests that corporate hypocrisy is a major barrier toward the adoption of sustainability and offers a typology of business behavior that can move closer toward the adoption of true and strong sustainability.

This article uses a normative lens to build upon prior literature and anecdotal evidence from the field to present a typology of business archetypes that represent a variety of responses toward sustainability.

The authors propose five typologies of business behavior that represent responses toward sustainability: business-as-usual, hypocritical pretender, hypocritical co-opter, responsible enterprise and purposeful enterprise. The first three typologies represent existing hypocritical approaches using weak sustainability. The last two typologies decrease corporate hypocrisy; improve alignment of talk, decisions and action; and help an organization adopt true and strong sustainability.

This is a normative paper that critiques existing literature and practices in corporate sustainability and proposes new directions. It necessitates further research in the form of case studies and empirical cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. It implies assessing firm impact in non-traditional ways and will call for the development of new measures and indicators of firm performance from a social and environmental perspective.

The typology can provide practitioners and researchers with one possible solution to eliminate or decrease corporate hypocrisy in relation to sustainability, reporting and communications.

Planetary conditions have worsened, and business activity continues to contribute to deteriorating conditions. This research attempts to help businesses move away from hypocritical and destructive practices and to adopt true and strong sustainability practices for a flourishing planet. Furthermore, the authors articulate policy and practice recommendations in this context.

After decades of failure to make progress in achieving planetary sustainability, this research offers a model for practitioners and researchers to use in defining the actions necessary to achieve the elusive concept of sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the dilemma of global sustainable economic development and poverty alleviation in the context of the environmental concerns.

A range of recently published literature focusing on the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) is reviewed. The arguments that are in favor and against the notion of poor being a “market” are examined. The implications of increased consumption by the poor even while the developed countries maintain their levels of consumption are discussed.

This paper argues that current levels of consumption by the developed world is not sustainable even as the world's poor begin to consume more to maintain a reasonable standard of living. New business models and models for sustainable development are called for.

Sustainable development is an extremely complex issue and it is impossible to address this complexity in a single article.

The paper challenges businesses to develop new business models that have more stringent constraints imposed on them.

This paper challenges the current norm of unbridled growth. The paper calls for academicians and practitioners to develop new models.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

Volume 16 of Research in Organizational Change and Development highlights several emerging trends in our field and in the world within which our research takes place. The papers that make up this volume hit on some familiar topics, all related to the challenge of invoking, supporting, or measuring organizational change but they also go farther than that. In Volume 16, we see evidence that the issues of concern to leaders and researchers are becoming increasingly global in nature. In order to understand these issues, we must pay attention to cultural differences, and the language that is used during change interventions to set expectations and deal with the myriad issues that threaten to undermine the success of the effort. In this volume too we see that different types of organizations approach change in ways that reflect their unique cultures and contexts. Rather than a one size fits all approach, authors of papers in this volume call for an understanding of these differences among organizational types and their implications for how we approach organizational change. The role of the leader in change is also examined in several papers here. We have known for a long time that leadership is essential during change, but these papers give us a fresh look at what it is that leaders do and say that affects the outcomes achieved. Finally, as always, we see included in Volume 16 some excellent contributions to methodology and research on the topic of change. Each of the papers in Volume 16 is well-crafted, thoughtful and very much worth the time to read.

Achilles A. Armenakis is the James T. Pursell, Sr. Eminent Scholar in the Department of Management at Auburn University. Achilles has published research on diagnosis, implementation, and evaluation of organizational change. His current research efforts are focused on the readiness, adoption, and institutionalization processes. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Management and of the Southern Management Association.

Branding has traditionally been viewed as an essential tool for marketers to establish an identity for their products. Even products among the commodity range make use of branding to establish a position for themselves in the market. Unbranded or “generic” products, therefore, tend to go against this branding principle. These products, which are usually sold at a price which is lower than their branded equivalents, are most often found in the area of low‐involvement grocery items. Previous studies of consumer perceptions of generic products tend to be broad in their scope by looking at generic products as a product category, rather than seeking consumer views on individual generic products. This paper identifies the characteristics of generic purchasers, and their broad perceptions of generic products as a group; and, the research extends previous work in the area by comparing a range of individual generic products to each other in terms of their value, quality and packaging. In addition, the research identifies how much importance consumers attach to value, quality and packaging when buying these individual products ‐ in generic form or otherwise. A mail survey of 1,000 New Zealanders revealed that, in contrast to previous studies, generic consumers tend to be older and on a lower household income. In general, consumers do not believe that generics are substandard products. However, when looking at individual generic products, the less standardized generic products are not performing as well as others when it comes to consumers’ perceptions and demands. Proposes that if generic products are to have a recognizable future, it may be necessary to embark on a program which enhances consumer perception of the quality and value of the less standardized generic products.

This paper aims to explore the extent, nature and communication potential of companies’ use of three popular social media platforms (Facebook, X and LinkedIn) to report on sustainability.

Qualitative methodology through the use of the netnography approach was adopted to evaluate the use of social media for sustainability communication by the Top 50 ASX companies. Content analysis of all company posts determined those with social and environmental content. A thematic analysis was performed using the global reporting initiative (GRI) framework to examine the nature of the reporting. The media richness framework was used to measure the communication potential of the social media platforms for sustainability communication.

The results indicated that the extent of sustainability posts on social media represented less than 20% of total social media posts. The nature of posts by the Top 50 ASX companies was higher on social issues than on environmental issues, which is contradictory to many previous studies. The study also found that while the social media platforms afforded high levels of media richness, most companies failed to exploit the platforms’ full potential to disseminate sustainability information.

This work provides both empirical and theoretical contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the use of social media for sustainability communication. The paper extends Lodhia et al.’s (2020) study of social media use for legitimation purposes and adapts Lodhia’s (2004) media richness framework to social media for sustainability reporting. It adds empirical insights into social media’s communication potential and value for communicating sustainability information.

The extent and nature to which organisations use social media to disclose their sustainability performance has significant practical implications for a variety of stakeholders. The results reveal to these stakeholders and the companies themselves the level of utilisation of social media along with the potential that can be harnessed. These results can potentially improve the quantity, timeliness and usability of sustainability reporting using social media platforms.

The study provides valuable evidence to increase understanding of the sustainability social media communication landscape, which organisations can potentially leverage to communicate their messages. Additionally, sustainability awareness is increased across various demographics by disseminating sustainability information to the wider public. This study will assist policy-setters in developing guidance for using social media for sustainability reporting.

This study extends existing literature, particularly the Lodhia et al. (2020) study, which has primarily focused on examining sustainability content in the media with limited exploration of the communication potential of social media platforms to communicate sustainability content.

Branding has traditionally been viewed as an essential tool for marketers to establish an identity for their products. Even products among the commodity range make use of branding to establish a position for themselves in the market. Recent times, however, have seen the emergence of unbranded or “generic” products. These products, which are usually sold at a price which is lower than their branded equivalents, are most often found in the area of low‐involvement grocery items. Previous studies of consumer perceptions suggest that while consumers see generics as being less expensive than their national branded equivalents, they are also seen as being inferior in quality. This research goes beyond comparing generic products to their national brand equivalents by comparing generic products to one another, in order to ascertain whether the “low price‐low quality” perception is more applicable to some generic products than others. A mail survey of 1,000 New Zealanders revealed that, in contrast to previous studies, generic consumers tend to be older and on a lower household income. The more standardized generics (such as rice) received more favourable ratings than the more processed generics such as coffee and shampoo, although there were significant differences in the respondents’ perceptions across different demographic groups. The results suggest that it is unwise for marketers to draw sweeping conclusions about consumer perceptions of generic products in general. Rather, each generic product, when compared with other generic products, has its own consumer perception and, therefore, each generic product requires different attention from different elements of the marketing mix.

The well-being of individuals is an essential issue of sustainability research. This study aims to focus on the particular case of teleworkers and the work conditions which may hinder their well-being. More specifically, this study analyses the impact of social isolation and work overload on the work engagement and life satisfaction of teleworkers during COVID-19 pandemic.

With a sample of 188 workers from the Portuguese banking sector, the authors use structural equations modelling to test a conceptual model. The authors carry out data analysis with partial least squares.

Social isolation and work overload are both negatively associated with the three dimensions of work engagement, namely, vigour, absorption and dedication. In turn, vigour is positively associated with life satisfaction. Social isolation and work overload are indirectly associated with life satisfaction through vigour. Results from multi-group analysis show that the negative relationship between social isolation and dedication is stronger for less senior teleworkers. By contrast, the negative relationship between work overload and dedication is stronger for more senior teleworkers. Additionally, the positive relationship between vigour and life satisfaction is stronger for permanent workers than for temporary ones.

This study tests the assumptions of the job demands-resources under the novel conditions of telework during COVID-19, focusing its ubiquitous conditions – social isolation and work overload. For human resources managers, this study highlights the need to take seniority and job stability in consideration when devising onboarding and working arrangement strategies for teleworkers.