Title: Evaluating sustainability practices in terms of stakeholders' satisfaction

Authors: Shirish Sangle, P. Ram Babu

Addresses: Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. ' Sustainable Business Solutions, PricewaterhouseCoopers P Ltd., Kamla Mills, Trade World, C-Wing, 9th Floor, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013, India

Abstract: Businesses have voluntarily adopted environmental strategies to go beyond compliance. This can be attributed to: a) business community|s realisation that environmental investments have the potential to improve business performance and b) pressure from multiple stakeholder groups. In order to improve business relations with the stakeholders, business needs to identify these stakeholder groups and also understand their environmental concerns across the entire life cycle of the product. The first part of this paper deals with relevant theory and introduces a framework to analyse significant environmental stakeholder groups and their influence across its entire life cycle on corporate behaviour. The second part of the paper presents a system approach to improve stakeholders| satisfaction and further develops a model based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to measure stakeholders| satisfaction. The results are discussed through a case of a steel manufacturing unit in India. The paper closes with a discussion of research implications.

Keywords: stakeholder satisfaction; stakeholder management systems; SMS; systems approach; life cycle thinking; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; sustainability; sustainable development; product life cycle; environmental concerns; steel manufacturing; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBGE.2007.011934

International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, 2007 Vol.3 No.1, pp.56 - 76

Published online: 01 Jan 2007 *

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