Hybrid Bottom Line: another perspective on the sustainability of organizations

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing concern and an increasing number of proactive initiatives from various stakeholders on issues related to the environment, social matters, and economic aspects and this has been the main driving force toward sustainability. However, most players that are deeply involved with environmental and social agendas indicate that these actions have been more of a temporary palliative for the current unsustainability problems than real structural solutions, especially in what concerns the relationship between short-term actions and long-term structural planning. Even though the general literature on sustainability is comprehensive, there is a paucity of papers which look at it at the organizational level, and under a cross-sectoral perspective. This paper is an attempt to address this gap. It presents the concept of ‘Hybrid Bottom Line’ as a new perspective in understanding and sustainability at the organizational level.

Keywords:

• corporate social responsibility
• integration sustainability
• Triple Bottom Line
• Global Reporting Initiative
• trade-off

Acknowledgement

Winston Jerónimo Silvestre was a recipient of a PhD fellowship (SFRH/BD/35747/2007) from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal.