Green is the new black : are CSR and sustainable business just fads?

CSR and sustainable business have emerged as major issues for business in the past 15 years. The rapid growth of interest among businesses in these concepts raises the question of whether there is a certain faddishness to adopting them. The focus of this paper is to examine the extent to which the current interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable business is the latest in a long line of management fads and fashions, or whether these ideas are instead more stable and permanent elements of doing business. We compare the purported characteristics of management fashions to those of CSR/sustainable business and argue that CSR/sustainable business has most of the qualities typically associated with fashions. A crucial question, however, is whether interest in CSR/sustainable business will demonstrate a bell-shaped curve; thus far, interest—as demonstrated by the number of academic publications and the formation of organizations dedicated to CSR/sustainable business—is on the rise. We discuss the implications of the fashion-like characteristics of CSR/sustainable business for practice.