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In Search of Sustainable Value: A Structured Literature Review

Author

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  • Andrea Cardoni

    (Department of Economics, University of Perugia, Via Alessandro Pascoli, 20, 06123 Perugia, Italy)

  • Evgeniia Kiseleva

    (Department of Economics, University of Perugia, Via Alessandro Pascoli, 20, 06123 Perugia, Italy)

  • Paolo Taticchi

    (Business Schools, Imperial College London, 457 ACE Extension, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, UK)

Abstract

The concept of value, where shareholders are the main recipients of the created value, is changing towards more comprehensive models, which respond to the increased stakeholder awareness and urgent sustainability agenda. Hart and Milstein (2003) elaborated the widely used sustainable value concept in which they characterize temporal and spatial dimensions of value, and suggest strategic drivers for sustainability. Although the framework is highly cited, there is no review on the changes over more than ten years. In this paper, we adopted a structured literature review methodology to discover how the concept of sustainable value has been used by researchers and how it has been developed. Our findings show that sustainable value has mainly been used as the general phrase to describe positive business results instead of using it as a concept. Scholars, who make an in-depth analysis of sustainable value do not emphasize the time horizon of sustainable value as its peculiar characteristic while broad stakeholder surrounding is called to be an important feature of sustainable value. Additionally, strategic drivers for sustainability have moved from being purely environmental as in Hart and Milstein’s (2003) concept: globalization, economic fluctuations, and knowledge innovation have become as important as green technologies and carbon-reduction policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrea Cardoni & Evgeniia Kiseleva & Paolo Taticchi, 2020. "In Search of Sustainable Value: A Structured Literature Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(2), pages 1-18, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:2:p:615-:d:308659
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