Reflections on ‘True’ Business Sustainability: Challenging Definitions, Recognizing Couplings and Developing Intelligence

The concept of business sustainabilitySustainability has been investigated, reviewed, and criticized by a plethora of scholars. What constitutes the essence of business sustainabilitySustainability —and its relationship to the actual state of our planet—is still an integralIntegral approach part of the discourse on business-society relations. Recently, Dyllick and Muff (Organization & Environment, 29:156–174, 2016) have reviewed literature in order to uncover what constitutes ‘true’ business sustainability, explaining the apparent absence of a couplingCoupling between corporate sustainabilityCorporate sustainability initiatives and the state of the planet and explore how this couplingCoupling can be strengthened. As such, the authors provide many relevant pointers for answering the question: when is business truly sustainableSustainable ? This paper aims to respond both critically and constructively to Dyllick and Muff’s article by addressing three points: the somewhat confusing conception of what actually comprises ‘true’ business sustainabilitySustainability , the authors’ choice not to address the underlyingUnderlying economic model economic modelEconomic model and the modelModel of consumer behaviorConsumer behavior , and the types of sustainability intelligenceSustainability intelligence that, in our view, business needs to develop to truly become a force for spurring sustainableSustainable developmentSustainable development . We use the Sustainable Development GoalsSustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (SDGs) as a case in point to illustrate our argument. In doing so, this paper aims to add to a firm-centered conceptualization of the business-society interface in a constructive way to stimulate further discourse on the concept, and to make a theoretical contribution with respect to coupling mechanismsCoupling mechanisms in the realm of business sustainability.