Abstract
Business increasingly participates in co-regulatory and self-regulatory arrangements along national governments, international organizations, civil society and private-public institutions. These co-regulatory and self-regulatory arrangements span multiple political arenas and jurisdictions from the community level to international relations. Fair trade and energy consumption labels, accounting and transparency standards as well forest certification and emissions trading are well known examples of the increasing role of business in the dynamic regulatory space.
Efforts to set up regulations are widespread in policy-domains that form part of the larger sustainability discourse. Demands to put sustainability and sustainable development onto the political agenda and the occurrence of business co-regulatory and self-regulatory arrangements have evolved in fairly parallel fashion since the 1990s. Business is frequently portrayed as the main (and often the only) source of environmental pollution, of decomposing social relationships and values through the exploitation of workers, of implementing profit and utility-maximization behaviour, of globalizing and homogenizing national cultural traditions, and of creatively destructing industries and national economies. However, most attempts to alleviate the business impact on the sustainable development of our planet involve at least some sort of business participation.
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Cologne) for their generous support of the kick-off conference ‘Business and Sustainability’, 3–4 June 2011, Konstanz, Germany. Their workshop grant enabled us to invite numerous contributors and discussants from North America, Europe and Australia.
Previous versions of many chapters were presented and discussed at panels and sessions organized by the Research Committee 38 “Politics and Business” of the International Political Science Association. We would like to thank the participants of RC 38 panels at the IPSA world conference in Madrid and the ICPP conference in Grenoble for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the chapters.
We would also like to thank the contributors to this volume not only for the quality of their papers but also for their patience during what was a rather extended production period.
The project benefitted from the help of many individuals and we are grateful for their support. We would like to particularly thank Marina Brügel and Stephanie Smith at the University of Konstanz for assistance in formatting and in editing the contributions. We also very much appreciated suggestions and comments from Aynsley Kellow. At Springer, Barbara Fess and Marion Kreisel supported the project and its publication. Mrs. Vinodhini, Project Manager at Content Solutions – SPi Global, did a fantastic job in editing and formatting the book.
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Lang, A., Murphy, H. (2014). Business and Sustainability: An Introduction. In: Lang, A., Murphy, H. (eds) Business and Sustainability. Sustainability and Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07239-5_1
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