*3.7. Number of Papers per Concept*

Based on the classification of papers that was presented in Table 2, Figure 9 shows the percentage of articles per concept. The majority of papers (36.11%) refer to sustainability strategies. 31.94% of papers are related to the integration of corporate sustainability and decision-making. 30.56% of papers combine the concept of sustainability with the concept of performance. Only 27.78% of papers combine the concepts of sustainability and business strategy, confirming researchers who claim that more research is required in order to examine how companies can formulate and implement sustainability strategies in practice and integrate them with their business strategy [10,26].

**Figure 9.** Papers per concept.

#### **4. Concept Analysis**

Sustainability is presented somewhat as a synonym of corporate sustainability and CSR, namely under the approach of the triple bottom line, i.e., considering the environmental, economic and social views [27]. In recent years, growing attention has been paid to sustainability as one of the most significant business goals because of organizations' concerns about human rights and the protection of the environment [28]. Researchers aim to explore how CSR can be integrated into strategic planning and how the three aspects of sustainability (environmental, economic and social views) can be aligned with the components of business strategy (mission, resources, market, customer needs, competitive advantage, stakeholder interests and value) [5,6,29].

A corporate sustainability strategy aligns social with environmental dimensions into the strategic management process, and highlights the company's strategic position with regard to sustainable development. Managers choose the sustainability approach in order to reduce the negative environmental and social impacts of business activities while increasing the financial performance of the organization [4]. Executives and academics have understood the significance of CSR for competitive success and they have used theoretical, conceptual and empirical perspectives to evaluate the relationship between CSR and performance [5,29,30]. In this view, [31] use a fuzzy AHP method to examine the selection of relevant sustainability issues and their integration into a company s strategic decision making process. The results show that the decisional criteria composing the fuzzy AHP hierarchies integrate the value chain activities and the dimensions of competitive advantage.

However, there is a gap between CSR and strategy [5,29,30]. Managers view CSR only in terms of social or legal responsibility. Many practitioners have connected the strategic view of sustainability with philanthropy or sponsorships for society in order to increase a firm's reputation. The business environment is complex and has many opportunities and threats for firms. Managers are obliged to make strategic decisions that do not ignore stakeholders' interests. It is important to find out how they can satisfy them in a strategic manner in order to increase a firm's competitiveness. Other researchers [8] and [32] proposed a framework, using Analytic Network Process, in order to examine the relationship between stakeholders' interests and sustainability strategy. The authors used 28 decision elements about stakeholders' interests. The survey was conducted in multinational manufacturing firms in the Philippines. The proposed decision model conveys a complex decision-making process and provides the content policies that should be considered in carrying out a sustainable manufacturing strategy. A decision- making model was proposed by [33] in order to examine the relationship between stakeholders' interests and financial performance. Results show that organizations need to evaluate diverse stakeholder interests in order to be aware of social and economic impacts and to be able to integrate this into decision-making. However, there is little guidance on the underlying process.

Thus, CSR can be fully integrated into the business strategy, developing a culture that is aligned with social factors that might affect a company. This alignment will help executives to inform shareholders, stakeholders and the society about their decisions, to fulfill firms' responsibilities with society and increase shareholders' value [5,29]. During decision-making, companies balance the importance and strength of stakeholder groups [34]. Furthermore, the alignment between sustainability strategy and business strategy does not only reflect a deep organizational commitment to a sustainable society but also establishes a perspective that an organization can increase economic success, profit and benefits for society [9]. The increase of economic success can support a vision that incorporates sustainability and includes economic, environmental and social elements. This vision can guide the decisions of managers and employees and helps an organization to earn profit by protecting the society and the environment. This vision also includes a strategic decision-making process that is based on decision-makers' commitment to sustainability. This strategy that refers to sustainability at all levels (corporate, business and functional), along with an organizational culture that promotes and supports sustainability efforts, positively contributes to business performance [35].

This gap requires the ability to translate sustainability strategy into action, developing plans, systems, goals and performance indicators. Findings show that executives have no common understanding concerning how sustainability is related to their daily business activities [7]. In this view, managers can combine, in the process of sustainability decision-making, external and internal drivers such as ethics, resources and cost savings, employees' shared values, leadership, reputation, market, laws, competition and customers' satisfaction into their strategic decision-making process, in order to make changes in their organizations and formulate a sustainability strategy that increases economic, ecological and social success [7,36–39]. For example, Fairfield et al. [40] examined how aspects of organizations, context, and decision-making processes can be aligned to influence the implementation and success of sustainability efforts. Drivers such as reputation, managers' values and attitudes, management support and organizational culture has a significant impact on sustainability strategy.

Other surveys indicated that leadership and organizational culture are fundamental drivers in order to promote the implementation of a sustainability strategy. Managers can motivate employees with their personal attitudes and values to understand the importance of sustainability [1,41,42]. Organizational structures that do not support collaboration and communication usually have a lack of trained employees, as well as the lack of clear vision of sustainability and policies about it, and are a significant obstacle for formulating and implementing a CSR strategy [43,44]. Size is also an important factor that affects an organization's willingness to formulate sustainability strategy. Large organizations have access to more resources and factors such as reputation, and stakeholder relationships play an important role in order to avoid environmental scandals and focus more on competitors sustainability strategies [43,45,46].

Corporate sustainability strategy can affect the productivity and efficiency of processes, support the development of more sustainable products and services, reduce the risks associated with environmental and social impacts and improve the benefits for an organization. These benefits may reveal themselves in the form of an increase in economic performance or improved competitive success, such as reductions in costs and risks, and improvements in reputation [4]. The improvement of reputation can allow firms to access new markets, attract new customers, and retain good employees. Customers are expecting organizations to be responsible with a concern for environment and society. Managing these issues can allow firms to be sustainable and increase their economic performance [47]. These results are confirmed by Tseng et al. [48], who used decision-making methods in order to evaluate sustainability performance. A decision-making method was used by [49] in order to evaluate corporate sustainability performance based on the triple bottom-line concept. The results of this survey, conducted in 34 high-tech listed companies in Taiwan, can be used as an important basis for management decision-making, and can also serve as a reference for banks and investors when developing investment strategy. Another similar survey was conducted by Wicher et al. [50]. They evaluated sustainability performance of an industrial corporation using the TBL concept and a new generation of decision-support tools.

#### **5. Discussion**

The existing studies have given a solid ground and now, a conceptual framework can be developed based on the literature study. Using an open coding technique, in the content analysis of the 72 papers, with the purpose of dividing the categories to be used into the classification of the papers, gave readers a good indication of the issues of concern (Figure 10). These papers indicate that this field is still in its early stages and further research is required. Although, many papers have built a theoretical base for corporate sustainability and strategic management, only limited studies provided guidelines about the integration of decision-making, strategic management and corporate sustainability. This creates opportunities for future researchers to explore this gap and improve the sustainability performance through strategic management and decision-making processes.

**Figure 10.** Conceptual Framework.

Furthermore, many papers conducted case studies in order to provide fruitful results, and researchers did not struggle through the deep penetration of corporate sustainability strategy because of unavailable generalized frameworks that provide guidelines about the formulation and implementation of action plans. Thus, there is a need for qualitative or quantitative research that provides conclusions about the effect of internal or external factors in the sustainability process, the integration between business strategy and corporate sustainability, the implementation of action plans, the challenges and problems of this integration, as well as the impact of this alignment on sustainability performance using decision-making methods.

The majority of existing studies explore the issue of integration from the sustainability perspective and not from the perspective of strategic management. Thus, researchers ignore a discussion about barriers and problems that they often face in practice during this integration. Such an analysis could lead to deeper insights because the alignment between business strategy and corporate sustainability is complex due to stakeholder demands, required competencies, external forces, market conditions, organizational culture, management structure, and it could also help managers to increase the quality of integration. Many questions have been raised, such as how can leaders motivate employees to participate in sustainability strategy? How can stakeholders be satisfied by the implementation of sustainability strategy? What factors affect the successful implementation of sustainability strategies? What should be the vision and the organizational structure in a company in order to improve the implementation of sustainability strategy? How can managers formulate and implement, in practice, sustainability strategies? How can decision-makers promote sustainability at all levels (corporate, business and functional)? How can the size of a firm affect the implementation of sustainability strategies?

#### **6. Conclusions**

The purpose of this paper was to map studies regarding corporate sustainability, strategic management and decision-making and provide a bibliometric analysis exploring the integration of strategic management, decision-making and corporate sustainability, providing a framework of interrelated issues according to the current literature in this area. The study is based upon an analysis of 72 papers, derived from databases and categorized according to the main issues of this emerging research area. The most significant findings of this paper are described as following. The first step for conducting this literature review was to study previous literature reviews. It was observed that previous literature reviews were systematic mapping studies and provided a narrative amount of knowledge in the area of corporate sustainability strategy and strategic management. This paper is a bibliometric study that provides a macro picture of a research field, and its evolution and connections among studies, in order to be a starting point for future research. This literature review helps academics who are already studying corporate sustainability strategies and decision-making, or researchers who have been introduced to the field but are interested in examining more specific insights into where current research topics in this literature can be located, and how they may contribute to them.

Regarding the descriptive analysis, Journal of Cleaner Production has published the majority of papers because its scope includes different topics such as corporate sustainability, environmental management systems or performance evaluation. There are also other journals such as Business Strategy and the Environment and Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management that include similar topics and have published many papers. Austria, USA and Germany hold many of the total number of papers published in the field of sustainability and strategic management. This finding indicates that industry sectors in these countries are interested in those research issues. Furthermore, Baumgartner, Hahn and Figge have significantly contributed in this field. The majority of papers are conceptual models and case studies. Although many models have been proposed by researchers, they have not been tested using decision-making methods. Researchers who conducted case studies have presented successful adoption or implementation of a corporate sustainability strategy but there still exists a need for a generalized framework that can be used by different types of industries in order to adopt, formulate and successfully implement action plans of corporate sustainability strategies. Finally, many papers used MCDM techniques or decision-making methods (AHP, TOPSIS, DEMATEL, GTMA, ANT) but the usage of modern survey analysis techniques (e.g., SEM or PLS) is limited. AHP is a flexible method for decision-makers because it provides a good understanding of the problem and handling the uncertainty of human factor.

This paper has some limitations that are described below. First, criteria for searching articles in databases include keywords "sustainability or sustainable development", "strategy or strategic management or strategic planning" and "decision-making or decision support" in the title and abstract of the papers. There probably exists papers which lack these keywords in the title but still focus on the field of sustainability and strategic management. Furthermore, only peer-reviewed journals were included in the dataset, however, there are also related papers in conference proceedings or book chapters. Moreover, journals from Elsevier, Emerald, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Inderscience were included in this paper but there are more journals that have published articles related to strategic management and sustainability. Another limitation is that only English papers were searched which may skip other publications in other languages. Thus, the use of different journals or papers from other sources could possibly lead to different findings regarding the most cited papers, or the most active researchers or institutions, and the percentage of papers per publisher.

Future researchers could expand on the existing models about the integration of strategic management into sustainability using decision-making methods in order to address the existing gaps. These models are expected to combine the aspects of sustainability, and the drivers that affect sustainability strategies with the business strategy planning. As this field is in the early stages and only limited studies provided guidelines about the integration of decision-making, strategic management and corporate sustainability, future researchers could explore this gap and conduct quantitative surveys in order to collect data from different industries and check the reliability of the theory developed, discussing the challenges and the problems of this integration. From a theoretical perspective, this paper is a bibliometric study that provides a macro picture of a research field, its evolution and connections among studies, in order to be a starting point for future research by highlighting issues among sustainability strategies research domains, while providing a complete overview of the literature from a different perspective, not implemented in existing analyses. Future researchers could expand this literature review and provide different bibliometric analyses such as co-author or co-citation.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, F.K. and M.A.T.; methodology, F.K.; data collection, M.K.; writing—original draft preparation, F.K.; M.A.T. and M.K.; writing—review and editing, F.K.; M.A.T. and M.K.; supervision, F.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.




#### *Sustainability* **2020**, *12*, 521



#### *Sustainability* **2020**, *12*, 521
