Responsabilité sociétale et développement durable

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Articles scientifiques

Sustainability-driven innovation at the bottom: Insights from grassroots ecopreneurs

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Publication date: January 2017
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 114

Author(s): Soumodip Sarkar, Mario Pansera

This research focuses on a little studied area within the future of global sustainability, that of grassroots ecopreneurs. While living and working in resource-constrained environments these entrepreneurs strive to create economic value by combining social and environmental goals. Relying on inductive methodology based on eight cases, the paper analyses how innovations are being crafted with little or no resources, yet provoking a great impact in their local communities and beyond. We find the grassroots ecopreneurs pursuing a triple bottom line approach, from the harmonic combination of economic, social and environmental goals that have the potential to shape the future of sustainability on global basis.






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Integrated crisis-energy policy: Macro-evolutionary modelling of technology, finance and energy interactions

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Publication date: January 2017
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 114

Author(s): Karolina Safarzyńska, Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh

Addressing four persistent problems, namely human-induced environmental change, financial instability, inequality and unemployment has now become an urgent necessity. To better grasp complex interactions between technological, financial and energy systems, we propose a formal behavioral-evolutionary macroeconomic model. It describes the coevolution of four populations, namely of heterogeneous consumers, producers, power plants and banks, interacting through interconnected networks. We examine how decisions by all these economic agents affect financial stability, the direction of technological change and energy use. The approach generates non-trivial, even surprising insights, such as that brand loyalty, captured by a network externality on the demand side, can increase the likelihood of bankruptcies of banks. Cascades of such bankruptcies are found to be more likely under greater income inequalities and higher electricity prices. We employ the model to assess macroeconomic impacts of sustainability policies along three dimensions: environmental effectiveness, financial stability and socio-economic consequences.






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Towards an intelligent network for matching offer and demand: From the sharing economy to the global brain

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Publication date: January 2017
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 114

Author(s): Francis Heylighen

We analyze the role of the Global Brain in the sharing economy, by synthesizing the notion of distributed intelligence with Goertzel's concept of an offer network. An offer network is an architecture for a future economic system based on the matching of offers and demands without the intermediate of money. Intelligence requires a network of condition-action rules, where conditions represent challenges that elicit action in order to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity. In society, opportunities correspond to offers of goods or services, problems to demands. Tackling challenges means finding the best sequences of condition-action rules to connect all demands to the offers that can satisfy them. This can be achieved with the help of AI algorithms working on a public database of rules, demands and offers. Such a system would provide a universal medium for voluntary collaboration and economic exchange, efficiently coordinating the activities of all people on Earth. It would replace and subsume the patchwork of commercial and community-run sharing platforms presently running on the Internet. It can in principle resolve the traditional problems of the capitalist economy: poverty, inequality, externalities, poor sustainability and resilience, booms and busts, and the neglect of non-monetizable values.






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The mediating effect of ethical codes on the link between family firms and their social performance

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Publication date: Available online 22 December 2016
Source:Long Range Planning

Author(s): Beatriz Cuadrado-Ballesteros, Lázaro Rodríguez-Ariza, Isabel-María García-Sánchez, Jennifer Martínez-Ferrero

This article brings together research on social performance, codes of ethics and family firms. Using a panel dataset composed of 547 internationally listed companies for the period 2002–2010, we test empirically whether the use of formal ethical codes could be a reason to explain the differences between social performance in family and non-family firms. We empirically show that family firms tend to present a lower social performance than non-family firms, and the use of formal ethical codes mediate such relationship.






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Mitigating Environmental Risks in Microenterprises: A Case Study From El Salvador

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Recently, international funding agencies and practitioners in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have argued that microfinance institutions (MFIs) could promote the adoption of environmentally friendly business practices in microenterprises in developing countries. This article explores the potential and limitations of MFIs in promoting the spread of environmental risk management techniques and practices in microenterprises using a case study of an MFI-sponsored pilot program in this area in El Salvador. The author argues that caution should be exercised about the role that MFIs can play in relation to inducing change to the environmentally harmful practices of micro-entrepreneurs. In fact, this study reveals that the MFI had some difficulties in building internal skills and reconciling its environmental and performance objectives, limiting its ability to assist microenterprises in the area of environmental management. Furthermore, the pilot program, as it was designed, did not sufficiently take into account the psychological and financial barriers that constrain micro-entrepreneurs’ capacity to engage in any meaningful environmental behavior change. Finally, factors such as the lack of an adequate legal framework and local infrastructure also countered the effort of the MFI and limited the potential of microenterprises for effectively engaging in environmental risk management practices. The article concludes by outlining the implications of this analysis for future research, policy, and practice in this area.


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