Green and social process patterns for sustainable businesses: lessons learned from Italian Benefit Corporations

In the last decades the attention of citizens and companies on sustainability issues has increasingly grown. Today companies are asked to consider economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability to operate in ways that secure long-term economic performance by avoiding detrimental social and environmental behaviour. Such a growing attention towards sustainability has led to the introduction of new methods, approaches, and organizational models to consider sustainability within business. As to methods and approaches, in the present work, those offered by Sustainable Business Process Management are examined. As to the new organizational models, the attention is focused on Benefit Corporations. Sustainable Business Process Management (S-BPM) – the managerial discipline that provides organizations with methods, approaches, and techniques to embed sustainability in the management of business processes – has recently emerged as a research stream of Business Process Management. In addition to traditional performance (i.e. time, quality, cost, and flexibility), in the case of S-BPM, the environmental and social performance are considered to properly manage business processes along their entire life cycle. Benefit Corporations – innovative hybrid form of businesses that purse both profits and common benefit objectives – have also been established to mitigate negative externalities attributed to the enterprises’ narrow focus on profit maximization that has characterized the capitalism model. Such a model has generated prosperity and improved the quality of life, but not without undesirable, in many cases harmful, social and environmental consequences. The dissertation aims to identify sustainable (green and social) process patterns that companies may adopt to undertake a sustainable transformation of their business processes. A sustainable process pattern provides reusable and practice-based solutions to environmentally and socially analyse, design and redesign a business process. By adopting the theoretical lens of process theory and a pragmatist qualitative research design, a qualitative content analysis of Benefit Corporations’ sustainability reporting documents has been conducted to systematically and objectively identify sustainable practices that Benefit Corporations implement to achieve their sustainability goals. Such sustainable practices have constituted the practical basis for the derivation of a set of thirty sustainable process patterns. The dissertation has theoretical and practical implications. By analysing sustainable practices adopted by Benefit Corporations to achieve sustainability goals, it contributes to advance academic knowledge on Benefit Corporations and address some literature gaps. By providing a set of sustainable process patterns, it contributes to advance academic knowledge in the field of Sustainable Business Process Management. As to practical implications, the dissertation provides a handbook of sustainable practices (in the form of sustainable process patterns) that companies and process analysts may adopt to analyse, design, and redesign business processes, and make them more environmentally and socially sustainable.