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Are profits and sustainability compatible?
This book brings unique perspectives to this key debate by exploring the history of green entrepreneurship since the nineteenth century, and its spread globally in industries including renewable energy, organic food, natural beauty, ecotourism, recycling, architecture, and finance.
The book uses the lens of the extraordinary and often eccentric men and women who defied convention and imagined that business could help save the planet, rather than consume it. The social and religious beliefs that drove many of these individuals are explored as the book looks at how they overcame huge obstacles to execute their strategies. The green entrepreneurs seen here are shown to have created new markets and industries, and driven innovations in sustainable practices, even at times when most consumers and governments marginalized the entire subject. The struggles of early pioneers appear to have been rewarded by the growth of environmental awareness among consumers, business leaders, and others in recent years, but the Earth's environmental health continues to deteriorate. If profits and sustainability have proved challenging to reconcile, the book argues that one reason was how they were both defined.
List of contents
- Introduction: The Business of Sustainability
- Part 1: Green Intentions
- 1: Pioneering in Food and Energy
- 2: Poisoned Earth: Green Businesses 1930s-1950s
- 3: Earthrise and the Rise of Green Business
- 4: Accidental Sustainability: Waste and Tourism as Green Businesses
- PART 2: Green Business
- 5: Making Money By Saving the World
- 6: Building Green Institutions
- 7: Can Finance Change the World?
- 8: The Green Team: Government and Business
- 9: Corporate Environmentalism and the Boundaries of Sustainability
- 10: Conclusion
About the author
Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. He holds degrees of MA and PhD from Cambridge University, and taught previously at the London School of Economics, and Cambridge and Reading Universities in Britain, and at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Professor Jones researches the evolution, impact, and responsibility of global business. He is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His recent books include Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to Twenty First Century (Oxford University Press, 2005), Renewing Unilever. Transformation and Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2005), and Beauty Imagined (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Summary
Today we imagine green business to be a new thing. This book shows that it is not, and that there were green entrepreneurs who had huge concerns about environmental sustainability, and built businesses that they hoped could address these issues, including Whole Foods Market, Aveda, and The Body Shop, among others.
Additional text
Profits and Sustainability shows that financial and environmental sustainability are difficult to reconcile as the growing environmental awareness of consumers, businesses and the state has been accompanied by cumulative environmental deterioration. It should be read by anyone seeking to better understand the shifting boundaries of corporate sustainability that is, what businesses can and cannot accomplish in the fight against environmental degradation and climate change.
Report
Jones has written a captivating, engaging and thoughtful book about the evolution of green business along with a serious discussion of whether capitalism and sustainability have been, or can be, compatible. Profits and Sustainability is a book which is rich in detail, based on original research, written in delightful language and reflects Jones exceptional knowledge of global business and the history of capitalism. Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Business History, Routledge
