Transitioning

While sustainability management is becoming more widespread among major companies, the impact of their activities do not reflect in studies monitoring the state of the planet. What results from this is a “big disconnect” between sustainable business on an organizational level and sustainable development on a global level. In this chapter we address two main questions: “How can business make an effective contribution to addressing the sustainability challenges we are facing?” And: “When is business truly sustainable?” In a time, when more and more corporations claim to manage sustainably, we need to distinguish between those companies that contribute effectively to sustainability and those that don’t. We do this by clarifying the meaning of business sustainability and link it to the global sustainability challenges. We review established approaches to business sustainability in the literature and develop a typology of business sustainability with a focus on effective contributions for sustainable development.