Running a company workshop on research collaborations between academia and private firms on corporate sustainability with sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) managers from around 20 European stock-quotes companies a couple of years ago yielded some most interesting insights. In the closing panel discussion, the participants were invited to share their experiences with cases where—in contrast to the business case idea—environmental or social issues did not easily align with financial objectives. No single participant spoke up on such a kind of experience. However, as soon as the official part of the workshop was over, numerous participants came to see the panelists, explaining that there were plenty of cases where different sustainability aspects were at odds but that it was inappropriate to speak about such experiences in public because it went against their firms’ official policy and credo that was built on a business case and the belief that sustainability pays off financially. These company representatives admitted that there were tensions and conflicts in corporate sustainability—but only in private, not in public. What this anecdote suggests is that there may be a disconnect between the official sustainability agenda of the firm and the way organizational members perceive and make sense of sustainability aspects—and that the official, business case–driven corporate sustainability discourse dominates over deviant and more pluralistic views of organizational members. In a similar vein, a recent study among 1,847 executives and managers found that roughly 70% perceive environmental and social issues as “significant” or “very significant,” yet only 10% see their organizations fully tackling these issues and another 40% feel that their organizations largely address these issues (Kiron, Kruschwitz, Rubel, Reeves, & Fuisz-Kehrbach, 2013). This disconnect between the way organizational members perceive sustainability issues and the action and strategies taken at the organizational level suggests that inside many organizations there may exist a dormant potential for more substantive responses to sustainability. However, this potential does not seem to fully surface and materialize and often individuals’ views on sustainability do not seem to trickle up to inform organizational-level responses to sustainability issues. Rather, it seems that the dominant business case logic (Gao & Bansal, 2013; Hahn & Figge, 2011) and the economics language that it uses (Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005) dominate over alternative views held by organizational members. In view of the often-bemoaned reluctance of many firms
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