Social-Ecological Systems and Responsible Management

• Management involves inputs like facilities, equipment, staff, customers, suppliers, transport, materials, energy, and information.
• Processes in management include process flow, work in progress, process design, planning, scheduling, progressing and control, and system improvement.
• Managing outputs focuses on products and services, customer satisfaction, unit cost(profitability), and environmental impact.
• Effectiveness in management means maximizing impact on people and resources.
• Efficiency in management means achieving goals with minimal resources.
• Inputs are considered to be people, goals, and resources.
• The process is linked to effectiveness and efficiency.
• Output results in performance, which can be measured using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• Efficiency and effectiveness in responsibility consider the value created (or harm avoided) in achieving goals.
• Addressing all stakeholders is a focus.
• Taking purposeful action requires responsible management competencies.

Responsible Management Competencies

• Social-Ecological Thinking: views society and nature as deeply connected systems, each shaping and sustaining the other.
• System: a perceived whole with interconnected elements that are subject to stabilizing, reinforcing, or destabilizing forces and feedback mechanisms.
• System Analysis: involves understanding how a system functions.
• Analysis Paralysis: an endless evaluation process.
• Social System: consists of social actors engaged in stable interactions based on shared cultural norms and values.
  • Individuals form the basic interaction units.
  • These units can also be groups or organizations.
  • An individual can simultaneously belong to multiple social systems, such as cities, families, campuses, colleges, corporations, or industries.
• Economic System: the institutions for making and implementing decisions related to production, income, and consumption.
  • It encompasses institutions, rules, laws, beliefs, values, attitudes, and taboos.
• Environmental System: where life interacts with abiotic components in the atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere.
  • Considered also as an energy system since it includes the capture, movement, storage, and use of energy.
• Sustainable Development: meets the needs of the present without compromising future generations' ability to meet their own needs.
• Social-Ecological-System (SDG 11): an integrated complex system with societal and ecological subsystems in a two-way feedback relationship.
  • Social Human Dimension: economic, political, technological, and cultural aspects.
  • Ecological Dimension: living beings, their relationships, human actions, interplay with atmosphere, water cycle, biogeochemical cycles, and Earth system dynamics.
• Humanly Used Resources are embedded in complex social-ecological systems.
• There are coupled Human-Environment Systems
• The system has interdependent physical, biological and social components
• Knowledge is integrated from diverse disciplines.
• This informs decisions today and answers multiple questions
• Foresight: creates shared vision by promoting dialogue among citizens, policymakers, and stakeholders to strategically influence the future.
• Foresight: guides the development of research, technology, and innovation policies and strategies.

Foresight Types:

• Foresight For Policy: helps create policies, set priorities, and identify key technologies for governmental investments.
• Foresight for Business: enables companies to detect change, interpret consequences, and formulate responses for long-term success.
• Foresight for Research: aims to identify promising avenues of research orientating the scientific community towards sustainable development goals.

Strategic Foresight Process:

• Strategic foresight offers foreknowledge across thematic areas and departments to those aiming for political, innovation, or business wins.
• Strategic foresight involves: Gathering Foreknowledge, Broadening Strategy Focus, and Enhancing the mindset of decision-makers.
• Gathering Foreknowledge: gathers knowledge of changes in trends, potential issues, and risks that need strategic attention.
  • Provides knowledge on emerging issues.
  • Detects warning indicators and relevant issues for decision-makers.
  • Identifies potential problems in public discussions before they occur.
• Broadening The Strategy Focus: enhances mutual learning between decision-makers and stakeholders, achieving a broad understanding of societal needs and impacts.
  • Develops potential policy, research, and business options, along with their assessments.
  • Prioritizes options based on societal, environmental, economic, and technological impacts.
  • Enhances complexity and interdisciplinarity in decision-making.
  • Examines external changes in relation to internal capabilities and drivers.
• Enhancing Mindset of Decision-Makers: helps decision-makers formulate informed future visions and strategies.
  • Helps grasp long-term implications of current policy, research, or business choices.
  • Supports understanding the relation between upcoming external changes and internal capabilities and drivers.
  • Provides decision-makers with a better understanding of how to use the future.

Stakeholder Innovation

• Collaborate with stakeholders to experiment and innovate shared solutions using collaborative and inclusive models instead of traditional top-down methods, and to make stakeholder engagement a core leadership skill.
• Stakeholders Theory: organizations exist within a network of relationships, interactions, and interdependencies.
  • Stakeholders impact and are impacted by an organization and its objectives.
  • Stakeholders theory addresses questions about value creation, ethics in capitalism, and business school education.
• Stakeholders: important people or parties who can influence or be influenced by a project or organization's success.
• Stakeholder's Management: ensuring satisfaction, information, and a voice for everyone involved.

Business as a set of relationships among stakeholders

• Stakeholders theory is a perspective to see organizations and their impacts on business, society, and nature.
• Business understood as a set of relationships among groups that have a stake in the business, and without whose support the business would cease to exist (primary stakeholders)
• Stakeholders theory considers the relationship between groups or individuals who affect and are affected by an organization.
• It seeks to understand what characteristics a group must possess to be considered as holding a stake in an organization’s actions and outcomes.

Categorizing Stakeholders:

• Primary Stakeholders: Customers, Suppliers, Employees, Financiers, Communities. There is interdependence between these stakeholders and the firm: both affect, and are affected by one another.
• Secondary Stakeholders: Nature, Special Interest Groups, Advocacy Groups, Government, Competitors, Media. Affect and are affected by the firm's pursuit of its objectives.

Communication With Stakeholders:

• High Interest + High Power: Engage
• High Power / Low Interest: Keep Satisfied
• Low Power / Low Interest: Monitor
• High Interest / low Power: Keep Informed, empower

Ethical and Responsible Leadership

• Lead with integrity and accountability, considering the broader impacts of decisions.
• Corporate sustainability balances relationships between business, nature, and society, with firms interested due to economic rationale, stakeholder pressure, and ethical considerations.
• Different relationships between society, business, government, and the environment underpin corporate sustainability, illustrated via industrialization, the modern corporation, and internationalization.
• Various sustainability issues are categorized using ESG and SDG frameworks.

Changing Context for Business, Nature, and Society:

• Increasing Relevance of ESG Challenges: scientific evidence supports the view that environmental, social, and governance challenges are globally rising.
• Rising Scope and Scale of Corporate Activities: firms have grown significantly and entered domains formerly controlled by governments.
• Digitalisation and Datafication: increased public scrutiny has made irresponsible conduct transparent, and tech firms contribute to ESG problems. Globalization and (the Lack of Global Governance): firms escape national regulation due to the international nature of value chains.
• Environmental Challenges Explained Through the Planetary Boundaries Framework helps with understanding the challenges.
• Planetary Boundaries: represent a safe operating space for humanity concerning different Earth systems.
• In 2022, 5 of 9 boundaries are surpassed which include: deforestation, climate, biodiversity, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities.
• Corporate sustainability focuses on managing and balancing a company's embeddedness in ecological, social, and economic systems for long-term balance, societal welfare, and stakeholder value.
• Corporations impact and are impacted by natural systems, requiring corporate sustainability to balance social, environmental, and economic interests.

How Corporate Sustainability Has Changed:

• Issues: What issues are addressed by corporate sustainability (e.g., community development, ecological diversity, social inequality, planetary limits)?
• Modes: How are modes used to address the issues
• Rationales are related to why, or what rationales are offered for addressing these issues and adopting these modes
• Corporate Sustainability Issues: problems or opportunities to which corporate sustainability is invoked or addressed, reflecting societal and governmental agendas
  • These include trends beyond single issues that trigger new sustainability agendas.
• Examples of issues include corporate welfare policies - concerns in environmental changes, consumer and investor preferences etc
• Corporate Sustainability Modes: has been a general historical development of corporate sustainability modes from corporate organizations themselves to other actors.
• Corporate sustainability reflects ‘partial' organizations alongside other actors in crosssector partnerships.
• Corporations open policies to outside influences, navigating complexity through shared expertise gaining legitimacy in the process.

Corporate Sustainability Actors:

• SOCIETY: is the core context of corporate sustainability, with powers over business.
• BUSINESS: shapes sustainability agendas to gain legitimacy, innovate, attract customers, motivate employees, and make efficiency savings.
• GOVERNMENT: is the key institutional shaper given its authority, ensuring functioning markets.
• NATURAL ENVIRONMENT: has become central in sustainability analysis due to alarming ecological trends like water scarcity and biodiversity loss.

Explore the relationships between societal and ecological systems. Understand coupled human-environment systems and the role of 'Future Literacy' in decision-making. Learn about effectiveness, efficiency, and foresight in responsible management and policy-making.