Historical Perspectives on Corporate Sustainability

This chapter offers three main historical perspectives on corporate sustainability. First, it addresses the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions of corporate sustainability. It investigates the ‘what’ question through the issues to which corporate sustainability has been addressed; the ‘how’ question through the modes which have been deployed to deliver corporate sustainability; and the ‘why’ question through the rationales that have been offered for corporate sustainability. Second, it investigates the ‘who’ question by unpacking the historical roles and relationships of society, business, government and the natural environment actors. Third, it examines the ‘when’ question through three key phases of corporate sustainability. It presents corporate sustainability in the contexts of: industrialisation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the rise of the modern corporation and ‘managerial capitalism’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and rapid internationalisation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries bringing wider impacts of corporate power and the greater awareness of the Anthropocene and human interdependency. This analysis of three historical phases is illustrated through the experiences of two long-standing companies: Boots, the UK pharmacist, and Tata, the Indian conglomerate.