Perspectives on corporate responsibility and sustainable development

Purpose The aim of this paper is to address the difficulty in describing sustainable development at an organizational level caused by the diverse meanings assigned to the term across different organization types. Design/methodology/approach The study was based on a meta‐narrative analysis of a select set of research literature on sustainability in organizations. Using interpretive synthesis to extract the key perspectives on what sustainable development means across organization types, the resulting categories of organizational sustainability were presented in a taxonomy and represented on Swanson and Zhang's Map of Organizational Forms to help describe their characteristics. Findings The findings reveal that sustainable development at an organization level has different meanings for different kinds of organizations. The relative weightings afforded the individual elements of sustainability – economic, environmental, social, and cultural – differ between organization types depending on a range of factors. Four new categories of organizational sustainability are presented and described. Practical implications The findings are expected to help researchers conduct further studies into organizational level sustainable development by providing them with distinct categories within which to focus their work. Originality/value This paper presents a taxonomy of organizational level sustainability perspectives and examines some of the factors that define the classifications. The viewpoints offered should deepen understanding as to why some organizations embrace and implement wide‐ranging and complex sustainability principles while others view sustainability in narrow terms – such as focusing almost exclusively on maintaining their own economic viability.