CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY
The concept of sustainable development is generally understood at the global level, which is the most difficult to apply at the organizational level (Gray and Milne, 2002). As far as corporate sustainability is concerned, its interpretation poses a problem, due to the fact that the academic literature during the last decades (for example: Reed and DeFillippi, 1990) has interpreted the concept of sustainable as continuity. Consequently, we have to re-interpret the accounting principle of continuing the enterprise, since now the realisation of the ideal of sustainability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a company’s survival.
First, however, we have to clarify what is meant by corporate sustainability and determine if there is a precise definition which applies to all companies. On a company level it is not necessary to distinguish between sustainability and sustainable development. The reason the word sustainability is used in this context is because it is the commonly used term.
In the literature, there is currently no unified position on corporate sustainability, so we can group the approaches as follows.
a) John Elkington’s (1997) name is linked to the triple optimisation of corporate sustainability, or the essence of the three-legged approach (Triple Bottom Line), according