Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to identify characteristics of visions that are associated with desirable performance outcomes.Design/methodology/approach: The paper examines findings from various vision studies in American, Australian and Thai businesses to derive characteristics of effective vision statements.Findings: Effective visions are characterized by conciseness, clarity, abstractness, stability, future orientation, challenge and desirability or ability to inspire in Australian, Thai and US businesses. Such visions are associated with higher performance outcomes.Originality/valueWhile vision is emphasized by authors and consultants as critical to superior performance, little is known about what characterizes effective vision. This study uncovers this unknown.

While organizational resilience is widely considered as critical to sustainability, gaps in both the scholarly and professional literature exist. First, stronger conceptualization of the term is needed. Second, little is known about how organizational resilience can be continuously accomplished via daily practices and processes. Finally, the ongoing organization theory development does not sufficiently address these gaps. Contributing to the literature by filling in these fundamental gaps, the present study integrates the disconnectedly growing literature into an organizational theory of resilience. Based on the General Systems Theory, the resulting theory comprises inputs of human resources, socio-cultural values, institutional settings, and social and environmental issues, enabling organizational structure, value and belief subsystem, resilience mindset, sustainability practices, adaptive and buffering capacities, and sustainability performance as the output. Their dynamic relationships are discussed and expressed via a model and propositions, followed by implications for researchers and practitioners.

While vision is considered as the starting point for any transformation process toward sustainability, little is known about how such a vision looks. To fill in a fundamental gap in the corporate sustainability literature, the present study advances a theory of organizational vision into a coherent theory of sustainability vision. It adopts the theory-building approaches of covering-law, enlightenment, and process by comparing and contrasting a diverse set of relevant plausible, logical, empirical, and/or epistemological conjectures so that highlighting occurs to form the substance of the refined theory. The resulting theory of sustainability vision asserts that effective sustainability visions are characterized by the seven attributes of brevity, clarity, future orientation, stability, challenge, abstractness, desirability or ability to inspire and one imagery of stakeholder satisfaction. Relevant propositions and a model are introduced for future research, followed by practical implications.

The present study develops a sustainable social enterprise model and examines relationships between corporate sustainability practices and sustainability performance outputs in a social healthcare enterprise in Thailand. Findings reveal four predictors of corporate sustainability, including Leadership, Stakeholder Focus, Resilience Development, and Sharing practices. All of them have direct and/or indirect positive effects on corporate sustainability performance outputs as measured by brand equity, socioeconomic performance and environmental performance. The study also proposes a coherent theory of Sufficiency Economy in business, build upon key theories from relevant fields. Lastly, the present study provides future research directions and managerial implications based upon the model.