Sustainability Risk and Crisis Management: A Taoism’s Perspective

This paper is to examine and analyse the social and sustainable risk and crisis in today’s business world and provide an overview of different approaches to risk management from the Taoism’s perspective. Combining academic rigour and management science in the West with the Eastern thought—the wisdom and philosophy of Taoism—offers an important resource and approach for organization and business leaders concerned with sustainability and risk management. Taoism has been one of the most significant components of classical and contemporary Chinese cultural values and philosophy. The ancient Chinese thinkers, Laotzu and Chuangzhu, along with the practices, have been used as key Western inspirations in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, ecology and health. Taoism has begun to penetrate different aspects of modern life, from lofty spiritual quest to everyday matters of health and diet, its relevance to contemporary concerns about the environment, peace and war, gender issues and life in modern societies. Nowadays, when the human community is facing the heightened contemporary fears about increasingly fractured relations between humanity and natural world, from resource depletion and species extinction to pollution overload and toxic surplus, the classical wisdom of Taoism provide new insights and values for human community to be in search of the solutions to social and environmental crisis and new and sustainable relationships to the earth. This paper will concentrate on the wisdom and principles of Laotzu’s Tao Te Ching and apply some of the principles of the Tao to sustainability risk management.