Redefining Sustainability

Sustainability is one of the most over-used words in business in the present time and the meanings attached to its use are so varied and vague as to render it effectively meaningless. In this chapter therefore we start by identifying an appropriate meaning for the concept before considering how sustainability can be applied in business. In doing so we set the concept within the current debates about sustainability and sustainable development. We then extend this to develop our definition of sustainability and its four aspects. This is further extended then to show that sustainability must be applied in a global environment to both the operational activities of a company and to the distributional decisions which are made