Economic, Social, and Environmental Performance

Economic, Social, and Environmental Performance



LEARNING OBJECTIVES


1. Be able to define economic, social, and environmental performance.
2. Understand how economic performance is related to social and environmental performance.


Webster’s dictionary defines performance as “the execution of an action” and “something accomplished.”http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ performance (accessed October 15, 2008). Principles of management help you better understand the inputs into critical organizational outcomes like a firm’s economic performance. Economic performance is very important to a firm’s stakeholders17 particularly its investors or owners, because this performance eventually provides them with a return on their investment. Other stakeholders, like the firm’s employees and the society at large, are also deemed to benefit from such performance, albeit less directly. Increasingly though, it seems clear that noneconomic accomplishments, such as reducing waste and pollution, for example, are key indicators of performance as well. Indeed, this is why the notion of the triple bottom line18 is gaining so much attention in the business press. Essentially, the triple bottom line refers to The measurement of business performance along social, environmental, and economic dimensions. We introduce you to economic, social, and environmental performance and conclude the section with a brief discussion of the interdependence of economic performance with other forms of performance.


Economic Performance



In a traditional sense, the economic performance of a firm is a function of its success in producing benefits for its owners in particular, through product innovation and the efficient use of resources. When you talk about this type of economic performance in a business context, people typically understand you to be speaking about some form of profit.


The definition of economic profit is the difference between revenue and the opportunity cost of all resources used to produce the items sold.W. P. Albrecht, Economics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983). This definition includes implicit returns as costs. For our purposes, it may be simplest to think of economic profit as a form of accounting profit19 where profits are achieved when revenues


exceed the accounting cost the firm “pays” for those inputs. In other words, your organization makes a profit when its revenues are more than its costs in a given period of time, such as three months, six months, or a year.


Before moving on to social and environmental performance, it is important to note that customers play a big role in economic profits. Profits accrue to firms because customers are willing to pay a certain price for a product or service, as opposed to a competitor’s product or service of a higher or lower price. If customers are only willing to make purchases based on price, then a firm, at least in the face of competition, will only be able to generate profit if it keeps its costs under control.