The Role of Corporate Culture in Corporate Sustainability: A Qualitative Research in The Education Sector
Project no. 22828 · Status: Kapanmış (Yayın bekleniyor) · 2021
Summary
<p>Today, it is thought that corporations which want to create a competitive advantage by providing corporate sustainability should give more importance to corporate culture practices. Hence, a strong corporate culture is one of the most important factors for corporations to become living corporations in the competitive market.</p><p>The concept of sustainability, in essence, emerged with human beings and was first expressed by the German miner Carlowitz in the 18th century. In our world where resources are limited, when it is accepted as an undeniable fact that irresponsible consumption to meet the needs of humanity will lead to disaster for future generations, the importance of the concept has become more and more understandable by all societies.</p><p>While the world population is increasing in an impreventable way, issues such as increasing needs, climate crisis caused by human activities, poverty have started to take place on the agenda of all nations. The breakthroughs that include solutions for today and the future have started to form the responsibilities of corporations that are essential parts of all socities. Thanks to the developments in technology, consumers, who can be instantly informed about events in any part of the world, have caused corporate production processes to be reconsidered, and it has become almost a necessity for corporations to implement responsible investments in their geography.</p><p>The main concept that will ensure that sustainability is internalized by the entire organization and channeled into business processes is corporate culture. In this context, in the first part of the research , the concept of corporate sustainability and in the second part of research, the concept of corporate culture are discussed in detail. In the third part of the research, in order to reveal the role of the two concepts on each other, the relationship between the 5 main corporate sustainability themes developed by De Grosbois (2016), which is used to measure sustainability practices in corporations, and the corporate culture dimensions of Robbins (1990), which helps to measure corporate culture are explained. Qualitative research results with 15 communication managers working in educational corporations also revealed that corporate culture supports corporate sustainability studies. It has been understood that educational corporations add sustainability-related themes to their vision and mission that constitute their corporate culture. It has been revealed that the studies carried out in schools are mostly about environmental sustainability and social contribution, which is one of the five sub-themes of sustainability. It has been revealed that educational corporations try to convey their sustainability principles to new employees by placing them through orientation and various activities, in-house communication tools and social media.</p>