Sustainability at the Academy of Management

I am away from Maine for a few days to attend the meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM). For the uninitiated, the Academy is the Pantheon of business school faculties. The annual meeting is a big gathering, attracting over 7000 attendees. This year is special because the Academy has chosen sustainability as its theme. This in itself is a big deal as sustainability and its predecessor, environmental management, have long struggled to get out of the academic closet. One of my former students, Andy Hoffman, had a major role in headlining this subject and organizing the sessions for the… Read More

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Unintended Consequences of Best Intentions

Wal-Mart’s announcement of their plans to develop a “Sustainability Index” has unloosed a spate of comments in the press and cyberspace. The bulk of these fall into three areas: – Is this genuine or just a sophisticated form of greenwashing? – What will this do for sustainability? – Can consumers really use the information to make “better” choices than they have been making? I am staying out of the conversation about the first topic with one exception. Unless one has information that runs counter to the claims made by Wal-Mart or any other business project that purports to be green… Read More

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The WSJ shows off Berkshares.

The Wall Street Journal (0nline) recently ran a short video about Berkshares, the local currency being used in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts. The Berkshares home page provides a link. This comes on the heels of a more general article on local currencies done by Time.com. I recently [posted a comment](http://www.johnehrenfeld.com/2009/07/my-book-rests-largely-on.html#comments) about a book I have been reading, *The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption*, by Gill Seyfang. Local currencies is the subject of one of the practical chapters. Their cases are all European-based, but have very similar features to Berkshares. Seyfang argues that sustainable consumption requires five factors, all part… Read More

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