Enhancing corporate sustainability. A framework based evaluation tool for sustainable development.

Corporate sustainable development is placed between simplified interpretations and an overabundance of complexity and requirements that hampers implementation. Stakeholder Relations Management is one approach for the operationalization of sustainable development on the corporate level, which enables the inclusion of aspects of sustainability into corporate decision-making in a pragmatic way. However, stakeholder pressure and economic constraints lead companies to adopt only a small segment of the concept of sustainable development. Therefore, a referential framework is needed in order to regard corporate initiatives within the wider context of sustainable development on the theoretical level. The framework of sustainable development presented here, which was developed during a research project funded by the "Austrian Science Fund", takes the wide range of notions of sustainable development into account. Like a map, the framework depicts approaches to sustainable development and provides an overview of the aspects of sustainable development (scope) as well as the different levels of complexity that are associated therewith (depth). This framework is conceived as a tool to classify approaches to sustainable development in a wider context.