Framing the triple bottom line approach: Direct and mediation effects between economic, social and environmental elements

By Göran Svensson, Carlos Ferro, Nils M. Høgevold, C. Padin, Juan Carlos Varela, Marko Sarstedt. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2018

239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Conflicting relationships between the economic, social and environmental elements of business sustainability, which are also referred to as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), characterise today's business environment. While the TBL has recently attracted considerable research, not a single study has empirically tested the direct and indirect effects between the TBL elements. By addressing this gap in research, this study sheds light on the structural properties focusing on the direct effects and the indirect effect (i.e., mediation) between the TBL elements. The results of two cross-industrial studies in Norway and Spain indicate that the TBL's economic element has a direct effect on the environmental element, with the social element mediating this effect. The results reported here offer long-needed empirical insights into the interplay between the three TBL elements, which have important implications for research and practice.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db5fe100cea24001b3e42c091a5581825283e118

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

In Marketing

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Structural model robustness checks in PLS-SEM (2020, methodology): “…in the context of PLS-SEM (Benitez et al., 2016; Hult et al., 2018), but research has witnessed the first applications of Gaussian copula and other approaches to identify and treat endogeneity (Benitez et al., 2018; Diallo et al., 2018; Svensson et al., 2018)—albeit outside the tourism field.”
Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability. A Bibliometric Analysis of Their Interrelations (2021, background): “Researchers have highlighted the role of CSR in the assimilation of environmental aspects in corporate strategies for survival and the constantly changing business environment [33,34].”