Human Factors, Business Excellence and Corporate Sustainability: Differing Perspectives, Joint Objectives

The papers in this book deal with an understanding of sustainability both in the sense of obtaining long-term success and thus survivability of a corporation and in the sense of the normative idea “sustainable development”, which has gained substantial relevance since the early 1970s. These understandings are represented by different approaches which can be seen as exemplary for a (more) comprehensive management, namely human factors on the one hand, and total quality management and business excellence on the other. They all comprise a stakeholder orientation coupled with a time horizon which exceeds the perspective of short-term earnings.

Reflecting the title of this book, this paper intends to show how these understandings are linked together and why realizing corporate sustainability can be seen as a challenge for those comprehensive management approaches.

In the first section, the term “sustainability” is presented in its original context of an economic principle as well as in the sense of the more recent normative concept sustainable development. Starting with these considerations, it is argued that the mentioned approaches are linked by concurring objectives, though differing in time focus and scope. Especially these differences can be seen as a challenge to broaden the perspectives but also to benefit from already existing synergies.