While many corporations still had the Greed is Good mentality, increasingly people were not buying the message, according to a UQ academic.
Senior lecturer in the UQ Business School Dr Andrew Griffiths said both shareholders and stakeholders were increasingly questioning non-sustainable patterns of corporate behaviour.
Dr Griffiths is the convenor of the Organisational Change and Corporate Sustainability executive program to be held at the UQ Business School Downtown from August 23 to 27 for middle to senior managers in government and industry.
The program will present the business case for sustainability and put forward convincing arguments that it makes good financial and management sense for an organization to engage with sustainability issues.
Co-presenters include business entrepreneur and founder of Rockcote building products Bob Cameron; Dr John Cole, Executive Director of the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency; and Professor Dexter Dunphy, of the University of Technology Sydney.
Dr Griffiths said corporate responsibility and sustainability were growth areas of organizational change and transformation, and part of a global sustainability movement.
In response, the UQ Business School has introduced the first of four courses on sustainability, and recent research initiatives include studies of corporate sustainable practices in the resources industry in Australia and New Zealand.
“We are faced with an extraordinary situation,” he said.
“Never before in the history of the world has the viability of much of the life of the planet been under threat from humanity.
“Never before have so many of the world’s people experienced such material wealth and so many others lived in abject poverty; never before have so many had such interesting and fulfilling work and so many others such degrading work or no work at all.”
Dr Griffiths said an attitude had prevailed among some corporate managers that all resources — employees, community infrastructure and the ecological environment — were there to be exploited by the firm for immediate economic gain.
“These firms disregard any negative impacts of their activities and externalise costs to others,” he said.
“A simple example from managing a household economy is to throw the rubbish over the neighbour’s fence or onto public parkland. All this does is transfer the cost to someone else. While efficient in the short term, we do not see it as leading to sustainability. Instead these practices result in exploitative relationships, alienation and community and environmental degradation.
“Continuing the analogy, we may reduce household costs in the short term by chopping up floor boards for heating and selling off basic facilities like refrigerators and stoves. In this case we have externalised costs to the future.”
Dr Griffiths said industrial era development patterns were not sustainable nor were they conducive to the creation of sustainable knowledge-based economies.
“The central question to be answered in this century is whether the current model of the corporation needs to be modified to contribute to the continuing health of the planet, the survival of humans and other species, the development of a just and humane society and the creation of work that brings dignity and self-fulfilment to those undertaking it,” he said.
“Achieving corporate sustainability is a challenge that will increasingly occupy the attention of CEOs, senior executive teams, change agents and key stakeholders of twenty-first century organizations.”
Dr Girffiths is the co-recipient with researchers at the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University in Canada of an A$150,000 Canadian Government grant studying the relationship between external stakeholders and aquafarming in Canada and Australia.
Dr Griffiths has co-authored three books, The Sustainable Corporation (1998), Sustainability (2000 and Organisational Change for Sustainability (2003) (with Dexter Dunphy and Sue Benn).
He is editor of a special journal edition of Innovation Management Policy and Practice on corporate sustainability and innovation to be launched in August.
To register for the Executive Education course, contact the School’s Executive Education Office, telephone 3346 9249 or visit: http://www.bel.uq.edu.au/?id=777
Media: Further information, please contact Dr Andrew Griffiths, telephone 07 3365 1619 email: a.Griffiths@business.uq.edu.au or Jan King at UQ Communications 0413 601 248.
