Towards Corporate Sustainability? An inquiry into the motivating factors and possibilities for creating increased focus on corporate sustainability in Norway

Generating sustainable development is still today a great global challenge, even though the climate change issues are pressing. Business corporations are significant contributors to creating sustainability progress, considering their scope of operation and the extent of their impacts. This thesis aims to bring insights into the motives for corporations in Norway to adopt sustainable practices and discuss how their focus on sustainability could be stimulated. The consultancy company Entro is for this used as a case study, which wishes to move customer companies towards a stronger emphasis on sustainability in practice. For Entro, the challenge seems to boil down to demand. The project’s data basis consists of interviews with employees of Entro and two of its customer companies. The research identifies a few main areas of motivators for corporate sustainability, classified as internal and external drivers with help from the project’s theoretical framework. The areas of demand and request, regulatory requirements, and financial and commercial considerations appear as the most important for companies. The results also indicate a current large emphasis on external drivers. However, relying on external drivers for further developing corporate sustainability could be problematic and result in too slow changes. The research further identifies a few elements or approaches that could contribute to promoting the focus or attractiveness of corporate sustainability. Several of these center around Entro’s practices and how the employees could better convince customer companies. However, the areas of finance, commercial considerations, and legislation are again found to be largely emphasized. Further perspectives for stimulating corporate sustainability development are discussed by applying the theoretical framework. The project does not bring any straightforward answers to the question of which approaches should be utilized for bringing sustainable practices to the corporate sector. The results show however that internally-driven motivation should be emphasized and that commercial business aspects should also be involved. Employing new organizational perspectives is additionally found to be advantageous for enabling creativity and thus maybe creating progress. In conclusion, the task of generating corporate sustainability is complex and appears to involve an interplay and arrangement of various aspects. However, to create development, this thesis highlights that we should likely think in new ways – although the barrier between academia and practice may be hard to overcome