Travelled Roads and Novel Vistas: Taking Stock of Empirical Studies into Tensions in Business Sustainability

This chapter takes stock of recent empirical work on paradoxical tensions in business sustainability. It investigates how people perceive of such tensions, what responses they envisage, and how they manage them. More specifically, this chapter reviews empirical studies that focus on the identification of paradoxical tensions; strategies to deal with these tensions; the processes of responding to paradoxical tensions; and outcomes of the application of these strategies. Based on the review, the chapter shows what we can learn from this emerging field of research and identifies avenues for future research. Research has made headway into identifying what types of tensions related to business sustainability have become salient to firms and what strategies they tend to use to manage these tensions. It is less clear under what conditions certain strategies are employed and to what avail. The chapter therefore suggests a stronger focus on conducting process studies to uncover these conditions as well as quantitative studies that investigate how adopting a paradoxical approach to business sustainability enables firms to simultaneously achieve environmental, social, and economic goals both now and in the future.