Paradoxical lens in sustainability tensions: Chinese and New Zealand partnerships
Abstract
Recently more and more Chinese and New Zealand companies have established business partnerships; however, while these companies joined to achieve financial success, they are also faced with difficulties in addressing sustainability issues. Hence, this entry empirically examines tensions in addressing sustainability activities and the reasons causing them between Chinese and New Zealand firms in business partnerships. In doing so, in-depth semistructured interviews were conducted at 16 relatively large Chinese and New Zealand firms in business partnerships. We find that these companies are faced with multiple sustainabilities which partially overlap across individual, organizational, and societal levels in a knotted and nested relationship. Theoretically, we contribute to paradox theory by identifying the complex relationships among multiple tensions. We suggest to the practitioners that it is difficult to manage the sustainability tensions simultaneously, because moving one competing demand may affect another one.
RAS ID
58183
Document Type
Book Chapter
Date of Publication
1-1-2023
School
School of Business and Law
Copyright
subscription content
Publisher
Springer
Comments
Sitong, C., & Eweje, G. (2023). Paradoxical lens in sustainability tensions: Chinese and New Zealand partnerships. In S. Idowu, R. Schmidpeter, N. Capaldi, L. Zu, M. D. Baldo & R. Abreu (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management (pp. 1-25). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_1110-1