**5. Conclusions**

Literature on corporate sustainability has increased considerably in the last two decades, confirming the importance of the concept as a paradigm shift in the way we conduct business and understand the relations between production, society and the environment. Despite the increasing contribution toward clarifying the concept of corporate sustainability, conclusions continue to be drawn that the concept is still elusive and unclear, and therefore open to interpretation in its applicability. We conducted an ontological analysis of the concepts of sustainability, corporate social responsibilities and corporate sustainability and showed how the concepts have converged to include the Environmental, Social and Economic dimensions. Furthermore, to look for the constitutive pillars of corporate sustainability, we performed a Necessary Condition Analysis, which looks at the constant presence of the condition (the constitutive element) in the presence of output (the concept). We built the hypothesis around the Environmental, Social, Economic, Governance and Time dimensions and demonstrated that the concept of corporate sustainability is clearly constructed around the Environmental, Social and Economic dimensions. We explained how the lack of clarity is rather related to the methodologies for integrating CS into company's operations, of which Governance is an important enabler. We highlighted how the literature has lost sight of the Time dimension, which provides the purpose of CS and explains the reason and the urgency for systematically applying CS practices in the business world. To make corporate sustainability effective we do need to look at 'Why CS is important'. This is not always been clearly or sufficiently specified in the literature and it is critical to achieve a system wide sustainability. We, therefore, defined corporate sustainability as the new business paradigm that requires attention to Environmental, Social and Economic dimensions to be able to provide for current and future generations. The utilization of the NCA methodology is new and brings a new theoretical foundation to the concept as well as scientific evidence over its constitutive features. We call for researchers to refrain from further developing novel interpretations of corporate sustainability, which would continue to increase confusion over the concept, and to focus on the area that require attention and additional contribution, which is how to implement corporate sustainability. The performed analysis is simple, the results straightforward, and the observed conclusions important. To further validate the findings, we suggest performing the analysis to include empirical practices along with the theoretical underpinning. Future research focus can also be on the meaning and definition of the environmental, social and economic pillars, as they are pluriform and multidimensional; as well as their measurability, which is a key enabler for integration and accountability.

**Supplementary Materials:** The following supporting information can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/su14137838/s1, Table S1: List of 132 articles with coding of corporate sustainability.

**Author Contributions:** M.P. developed the theoretical framework, proposed the methodology, gathered the data, conducted the analysis and wrote the original draft. M.d.J. helped to conceive the study, provided academic guidance and practical support, and helped with review and editing. D.S. provided strong and in-depth supervision from the inception of the research proposal to the submission of the article. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data which have been utized are in the Supplemental Material. There are no additional data to report.

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