Legitimizing Corporate (Un) Sustainability: A Case Study of Passive SMEs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this article is to explore how decision makers in small- and medium-sized enterprises explain their lack of commitment to sustainability through various justifications. These justifications are intended to rationalize and legitimize, through socially acceptable arguments, the absence of substantial actions in this area. A case study based on 33 interviews in nine Canadian small- and medium-sized enterprises showed that managers rationalize their lack of commitment to sustainability in several different ways. These can be grouped into three main types of justifications: prioritization of economic survival, looking for a scapegoat, and denial and minimization (denial of negative impacts, minimization of sustainability issues, self-proclaimed sustainability). The study contributes to bridge the gap between the literatures on neutralization theory, resistance to institutional pressures, and corporate unsustainability. It also sheds further light on the reasons underlying the lack of commitment to sustainable development and how managers justify this to themselves and others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".