Meet Bastiaan van der Linden, the sustainability professor who bridges divides

“I started by studying Business Administration, not so much because of an interest in business but because from the beginning I liked doing things together with other people”, Bastiaan says. “But as interesting as this field was, I missed some more reflective studies. So, I added sociology to the mix”. After getting his Master’s degree in 2003, he embarked on a PhD with enough autonomy to define his own topic. Adding a philosophical perspective to his holistic view of business and value creation, he presented his thesis "The Creation of Value(s) in Business" at Nijmegen School of Management (Netherlands) in 2012 (1).

Bastiaan’s desire to abolish barriers might have something to do with his Dutch roots: “The Dutch often have a consensus-based mode of conflict resolution and they tend to think in terms of commonality of interests”, he says. “They look at how we can do things together, by bringing contradictions to the table. For an individual, this can be very suffocating, and I feel very much for the early 20th-century poet Slauerhoff and his poem In the Netherlands I cannot live (2). But this philosophy works pretty well for business and research.”

For a couple of years, Bastiaan used this approach to solve problems through consultancy, helping high-profile clients like Aon Hewitt, Delta, or one of the municipalities of Amsterdam: “I loved situations with diverging interests and tension, being able to find a “together”, or to diplomatically negotiate a way forward and usher in a deep organizational transformation.” His attachment to stakeholder theory enabled him to see a problem from multiple angles and to find the point where individualities can converge. After a few years as a lecturer at Nijmegen School of Management, and working as a freelance consultant in projects relevant to his academic interests, he found his way to EDHEC in 2016.

For almost eight years now, Bastiaan has brought to EDHEC his vision of interconnectedness, at a time when businesses and business schools finally realized that sustainability couldn’t be contained in a silo anymore. “I don’t believe the label CSR is very helpful in thinking about business sustainability, it’s too compartmentalized”, he ponders. “This may seem a strange thing to say for an Associate professor of CSR, but this language risks painting questions of sustainability as separate from business concerns. It echoes our unproductive habit of seeing Planet on one side and People on the other. This hides the interdependence of environmental and social systems. We need to think differently: to strive for sustainability AND business, to aim for living in symbiosis WITH our planet, not merely living ON it.”

With EDHEC, he found adequate grounds for experimentation, coming on board right when the school ushered in a new era for business sustainability, going from specialization to integration in virtually all programs. “EDHEC is also a convergence of worlds”, he says. “Business, academia, education, students and their international backgrounds, it’s liberating to see all this coming together. It makes for an interesting construction of a blended reality with great opportunities to discover and develop a new business vocabulary.”

Always at the intersection of theoretical and practical, Bastiaan has been using his research hat to broaden businesses’ ambitions: from the use of narratives in sustainability reporting (3) to a holistic view of business decision-making (4) and improving the legitimacy of the governance of sustainability labels (5).

Bastiaan is convinced the best is yet to come for business and sustainability. “One of the big challenges”, he says, “is to figure out what we mean when we talk about business purpose. Right now, we put a lot of pressure on this concept. Purpose is said to foster employee engagement, boost customer attraction, seduce investors, not to mention save the planet! These are big ambitions for a simple word. Purpose is a natural human trait: it is one reason for the unparalleled achievements of humankind like organizing itself or building complex societies and production systems. But so far, this purposeful behavior has mainly gone at the expense of the planet. It’s far from obvious how purpose alone could now save it. This is one of the questions to which I hope to dedicate myself in the upcoming years.”

On the teaching front, Bastiaan sees the MSc in Global & Sustainable Business, of which he is the founding Director, as another example of bringing worlds and people together: “Professors used to see students as a sort of specialized sponges that should soak up as much knowledge as they can”, he says, “but companies need competent people. Competence is not the same as being knowledgeable. That’s why we need to train our students differently: to get them to make connections between topics, to have an integrated view of everything a business is made of, and to think in terms of impact and stakeholders. We want them to connect with their topics in intellectual, practical, and personal ways.”

To him, this approach is aligned with the EDHEC “learning by doing” philosophy: ”We built a program to support this kind of learning: students choose and develop their own cases, and they exercise their own worldviews by choosing how to address them. We encourage them to cultivate their individuality, to confront their beliefs to others, and to build something bigger together. In a way, we’re training them for what we’d like to see more in the world: to move beyond the dichotomy of competition versus cooperation and to get on with it.”

A label-free idealist, Bastiaan is an inspirational force, with his head in the theoretical domain and his feet firmly planted on the business ground. He seems to have found a perfect home in EDHEC, where he helps push the school and students towards better integration of sustainability and, in doing so, enhances our relevance in the face of today’s challenges.

Key dates

Since 2019: Director, MSc in Global & Sustainable Business, EDHEC Business School

2016 and 2019: Visiting research scholar, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia (US)

Since 2016: Associate Professor, EDHEC Business School

Since 2014: co-editor-in-chief, Business and Professional Ethics Journal

2012: PhD thesis The Creation of Value(s) in Business, Nijmegen School of Management (Netherlands)

2011-2016: Lecturer, Nijmegen School of Management (Netherlands)

2009-2011: Consultant, SBI Organisatieadvies, Doorn (Netherlands)

2004-2009: Junior researcher, PhD program, Nijmegen School of Management (Netherlands)

2003-2016: Freelance consultant

2003: Master’s degree in Business Administration, Nijmegen School of Management (Netherlands)

To know more about Bastiaan van der Linden

• Visit his EDHEC webpage
• Go to his Research gate profile
• Take a look at his Linkedin profile

References

(1) PhD, "The Creation of Value(s) in Business", Nijmegen School of Management (2012).

(2) "In Holland...", J. Slauerhoff. https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-17882_IN-HOLLAND/

(3) Van der Linden, B., Wicks, A.C. & Freeman, R.E. How to Assess Multiple-Value Accounting Narratives from a Value Pluralist Perspective? Some Metaethical Criteria. J Bus Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05385-1

(4) Van der Linden, Bastiaan, and R. Edward Freeman. 2017. “Profit and Other Values: Thick Evaluation in Decision Making.” Business Ethics Quarterly 27(3): 353–79. doi: 10.1017/beq.2017.1.

(5) Martens, W., van der Linden, B. & Wörsdörfer, M. How to Assess the Democratic Qualities of a Multi-stakeholder Initiative from a Habermasian Perspective? Deliberative Democracy and the Equator Principles Framework. J Bus Ethics 155, 1115–1133 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3532-4