Sustainable business strategies: typologies and future directions

The purpose of this paper is to develop a typology of sustainable business strategies that may help to guide future empirical research.

The approach involves a review of prior typologies and an application of the resource-based view of the firm to identify the resources and capabilities associated with each strategy.

Research propositions concerning the relationship between implementation of each strategy and requisite capabilities are offered.

The research propositions developed in the paper offer a means to catalyze future empirical research at the intersection of strategy and sustainability.

Barriers to understanding the capabilities necessary to implement sustainability strategies render sustainable development an elusive goal. This paper helps to advance this understanding, identifying the primary capabilities needed to implement distinct sustainability strategies.