Unlocking Doing by Doing Good: A Sustainable and Ethical Operations Perspective

Sustainable and ethical operations (SEO) are crucial for modern businesses. However, the desire for SEO from society and scholars has not yet been balanced with the concerns of managers and practitioners about how to successfully put SEO into practice. It is questionable whether ‘doing well’ (e.g., operations excellence) is accomplished by ‘doing good’ (e.g., environmental and ethical practices). In this chapter, we present an SEO operations framework to help understand practical concerns and explore strategies and models for achieving successful SEO outcomes. We suggest analyzing the context of operations by examining the drivers and barriers to SEO that are proposed in this chapter. This allows companies to clearly identify their own operations attributes and market/regulation demands in order to design appropriate SEO strategies. We also propose compliance and innovative strategies for companies to focus on meeting demand-driven SEO or striving for operations improvement. Scholars in operations management (OM) and managers should make an effective use of supporting factors while being mindful of challenges and critical issues in order to ensure that SEO translates into tangible and successful outcomes.