and holistic perspectives on corporate sustainability*

Abstract not found

During the last decades the global business environment suffered the effects of successive waves of management requirements. Companies have adapted, or are trying to adapt, to quality and environmental management standards and to occupational health and safety legislation and standards. The recent publication of the standard SA8000 on “Social Accountability ” is a harbinger of events to come. Social and ethical questions are growing in importance and will have to be adequately tackled by companies in the years to come. For companies social and ethical accounting are emerging as basic instruments to answer to demands of improved transparency and accountability from various stakeholders. As a result of this trend, at present there are already several organisations accredited to audit facilities for conformance to SA8000 as well as a growing number of SA8000 third-party certified companies. This is the moment to both increase awareness of the issues raised by SA8000 and discuss the attitude towards yet another movement towards certification, at the light of the mixed experiences with standards such as the ISO9000 and ISO14000 series.

Possible trade-offs between pretensions of the tourism sector on tropical islands and societal requirements of sustainable development are examined for the case of the Seychelles ’ island La Digue within this master thesis. Tourism is the main economic factor on the Seychelles, thanks to a unique marine and terrestrial ecosystem. Its tourism marketing is based on an exclusive, unspoiled, three to five star destination. However, even if the Seychelles government recognized the risk of destruction of the ecosystem since already 1980, there is still no sign regarding a stop in tourist infrastructure construction. This study uses La Digue Island as a case study to assess the ecological, economical and social dimensions of sustainability of possible future tourism development states, with a focus on the impacts of tourist infrastructure development. An emphasis of this study lies in the involvement of the knowledge of a broad range of stakeholders, especially tourists and local stakeholders. A combination of transdisciplinary methods is applied in order to generate and assess different consistent scenarios representing a possible tourism development of La Digue for

Helping people learn to adopt more pro-social lifestyles usually involves persuading them to take new, beneficial actions. However, certain pro-social goals, such as achieving environmental sustainability, also require people to stop performing harmful actions—people are commonly instructed to drive less, use less electricity, and otherwise reduce the amount of resources they consume and waste they produce. In order to help people adopt this potentially unintuitive form of behavior change, we introduce a theoretical framework for the concept of "negabehaviors. " A negabehavior is a manner of conducting oneself that supplants undesirable actions—that is, the behavior of not performing specific, undesirable actions. Negabehaviors are a variation on the idea of "negawatts " (a unit of energy saved through conservation), and offer a way to view and teach environmental sustainability that focuses on subtractive elements rather than additive ones. In this paper we present a framework and theoretical grounding for understanding negabehaviors. We discuss the relationship between negabehaviors and environmental sustainability, describing potential ways that this concept can be used in formal and informal sustainability education. By placing an emphasis on actions people need to stop taking, we can make it easier to encourage people to live more sustainable lives. Key Words: negabehaviors, behavior reduction, environmental sustainability, sustainability education, persuasive technology