Acceptability of operations, corporate responsibility, sustainability, or what? - the many faces of responsibility within the global pulp and paper industry

This work summarises the essential findings of the empirical analysis of responsibility within the Scandinavian-based pulp and paper industry that was studied by quantitative and qualitative methods, employing the acceptability of operations as an indicator. The data were gathered at four mills of the case company, Stora Enso Oyj, located in four countries, China, Finland, Germany and Portugal, by interviewing the internal and external stakeholders. The interview material gave a number of definitions of the acceptability of operations and allowed a few dominant regional characteristics to be extracted. The main elements of acceptability for the Chinese were loyalty, distribution of welfare and cultural diversity, while the Finnish stakeholders emphasised profitability, sustainability and communication, the Germans socioeconomics, the solid waste problem and global forest operations and the Portuguese case showed the importance of technical competitiveness, quality of the products and land use. The results showed that the acceptability elements covered issues beyond the traditional dimensions of corporate social responsibility. This demonstrated that the traditional concepts of corporate social responsibility, or corporate responsibility, are not adequate when dealing with the operations of a global company.