Organisational Sustainability and the SME; An Examination of Irish Owner/Managers’ Attitudes.

The adoption of social responsibility reporting is growing in large multinational organisations (Smith, 2011). Organisations are increasingly developing management systems for sustainability built on and reporting against the triple bottom line standard (Spooner and Kaine, 2010). Much scholarly attention has been focused on the issue of sustainability as directed to environmental matters however there is an emerging interest in organisational sustainability. There is growing public and business interest in building sustainable organisations and increasing research and educational intereest in the topic of organisational sustainability (Pfeffer, 2010). Despite this there remains a lack of a precise definition of sustainability in the literature (Smith and Sharicz, 2011). In addition the majority of research seeking to examine organisational sustainability has done so within the confines of large multinational organisations to the exclusion of smaller enterprises. This paper explores the concept of sustainability as it applies to the SME sector in Ireland. In particular the authors are interested in exploring the systemic issues which influence owner/managers’ attitudes regarding the desirability and/or achievement of the concept of ‘sustainability’.