Sustainability and Stakeholders: Tensions and Balances

Many companies struggle to manage corporate sustainability effectively. Some overstate their ambitions, engaging in greenwashing, while others treat sustainability as a peripheral add-on disconnected from core operations. Initiatives may lack employee support or fail to resonate with customers, resulting in frustration, inefficiency, and missed opportunities. This course starts from the premise that weak sustainability implementation often stems from imbalanced stakeholder relationships. When managers fail to balance the needs and expectations of different stakeholders, tensions and conflicts arise. Learning to understand and manage these tensions is central to effective corporate sustainability. We introduce stakeholder theory as a central framework for the course, including an interview with its founder, R. Edward Freeman. Throughout the course, stakeholder theory serves as our lens for examining how real-world organisations address both the challenges and opportunities involved in integrating sustainability into organisational practice. We explore sustainability in relation to key stakeholder groups, including across functions and roles within organisations. You will have rich opportunities to analyse organisational efforts, reflect critically on different sustainability strategies, and consider how these insights apply to an organisation of your own choice. We also invite you to contribute examples from your own context and country, so that together we can broaden our understanding and discover new approaches to sustainability. By the end of the course, you will have developed a clear understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved in integrating sustainability into organisational practices. You will gain a solid grounding in stakeholder theory and balancing practices, and we will introduce a range of approaches that organisations use in their transition towards sustainability. Most importantly, you will be equipped to think about corporate sustainability in new and practical ways, and to design strategies that balance stakeholder demands constructively. This is an exciting time to be working with sustainability integration — and we look forward to exploring it with you. Let’s get started.