HRD in Sustainability to Enhance Sustainable Development

Abstract: Despite ongoing efforts to integrate sustainability in business strategy, the complexity of the concept of sustainability has remained challenging to adopt. Considering the importance of environmental, social, and economic factors for global sustainable development as well as a company's long-term success, 96% of world’s leading 250 companies have published sustainability reports in 2020 and 2022 (KPMG International, 2022). The increasing publishing report rate is a result of the international regulations (e.g. carbon emission regulations), international guidelines, and Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) (Lee & Saen, 2012), showing that a company's sustainability objectives imply not only the success of the organization but global sustainable development (Morioka & de Carvalho, 2016).
However, the human resource development (HRD) aspect, which makes sustainability initiatives sustainable in the organization in the long-term, is not highlighted. As pointed out by HRD scholars, the HRD field has overlooked linking the UN's sustainable development goals (UN, 2015), which creates a void in aligning organizational strategies with sustainability (Cho & Hyatt, 2023; Zarestky & Collins, 2017). Indeed, sustainability offers challenging and exciting new assignments for the intersection of HRD and organizational learning. HRD should link employee knowledge, skill, and competencies to societal strategies through organizational learning, articulating the importance of learning and development for sustainability (Ardichvili, 2013; Cosby, 2014). Yet, HRD has been negligent in identifying the skills, mindsets, and learning programs required of its employees or connecting them with sustainability reports that demonstrate the company's efforts to develop and achieve toward sustainability goals. Further, there is little research about how HRD can contribute to sustainability initiatives. Thus, it is important to better understand organizational efforts adopting sustainability to solve the emerging challenge. In that way, the necessary mindset and skills for sustainability will be identified and utilized in internal and external training as well as recruitment and promotion processes.
To provide a better understanding of sustainability initiatives at the global level, this study aims to identify emerging themes for sustainability initiatives and investigates how sustainability education drives the ongoing efforts to promote sustainability in the organization. To dive into the discursive framing of sustainability initiatives, three research questions developed: RQ1. What are the emerging themes that HRD should focus on in the most recent sustainability reports? RQ2. What kind of sustainability education in the organization has been conducted in the organization? RQ3. How can sustainability education drive sustainability initiatives effectively?
In general, sustainability is explained through basic three dimensions: environmental, economic, and social (Purvis, 2019). Purvis (2019) asserted that each dimension is interconnected and operates as a holistic system. The triple bottom line (TBL) concept was introduced by Elkington (1997), and it provides a groundwork to assess the accomplishment and success of an organization based on the three lines (Goel, 2010). Elkington (1997) employed the terms profit, people, and planet which refer to economy, society, and environment, respectively, while claiming that the environmental line incorporates the economic and social lines. Unlike some studies mainly focusing on the environmental line (Yan, Chen, & Chang, 2009) or the social line (Bibri, 2008) regarding the concept of sustainability, this study gives the same level of importance on each part of the triple bottom line.
Sustainability reports are a major means by which organizations articulate their sustainability commitment and sustainability education to foster transparency, accountability, and positive environmental, social, and governance practices. The study samples sustainability reports from the top 100 companies in the United States published by Fortune magazine (Fortune 100) in 2023 to investigate how organizational public discourses perpetuate their stainable practices and values within corporate cultures and stakeholder perceptions. By utilizing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach, specifically topic modeling (Blei et al., 2003), the study will uncover the topics and topic-related keywords used in corporate sustainability reports. Thereby, through this method, the research will identify the underlying themes related to organizational learning and the roles of HRD embedded within corporate sustainability reports.
The study takes an NLP approach to extract latent topics from closely correlated keywords found within sustainability reports. The identified topics and themes serve as vehicles through which the discourses construct and guide sustainability practices, fostering a better understanding of the core dynamics driving corporate sustainability initiatives. Additionally, they provide a framework for assessing existing gaps and areas where improvements are needed in these practices. From the lens of education, we further filter the topics that resonate with HRD strategies, enabling a nuanced exploration of how sustainability concepts can be effectively integrated into HRD to empower sustainability-minded leaders.