Steads: Sustainability Award

JOHNSON CITY – East Tennessee State University faculty members Drs. Jean and Ed Stead were recently recognized at the Auburn University Spirit of Sustainability Awards program.

The award was created to recognize individuals or groups of Auburn University students, faculty, staff and alumni who “exemplify the Auburn spirit by making significant contributions toward sustainability on campus or in a community at any point along the Sustainability Compass: Nature, Economy, Society, Wellbeing.”

While all nominations reflect numerous areas of sustainability, recipients of the Spirit Award are chosen based on their motivation and commitment to sustainability, the impact of their work and the degree to which they engage and involve others in their efforts.

The Steads, both professors in the Department of Management and Marketing in the ETSU College of Business and Technology, were the alumni recipients of the Spirit Award for their pioneering work in the field of sustainability in business.

In 1992, the Steads published the first book on the topic, “Management for a Small Planet,” which is now in its third edition.  The first edition of the book received the American Library Association Choice Outstanding Book Award.  The Steads also published the first book integrating sustainability into strategic management in 2004.  “Sustainable Strategic Management” is now in its second edition, and both books are widely used as textbooks around the world.

The Steads are not only pioneers in sustainability research in business, but they have also made contributions in teaching and service to the management profession.  In 1990, they created the first course in the United States in strategic environmental management in the ETSU College of Business and Technology.  They became founding members and officers of the Organizations and Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management, the international professional organization of management scholars, in 1994, and they established the first center in the nation for community sustainability in 1999.

In 2015, the Steads were instrumental in creating and delivering the first Sustainability in Business Summit for their alma mater in Auburn’s Raymond J. Harbert College of Business, where both earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.  Jean Stead later earned an M.B.A. degree at Western Illinois University, and both earned Ph.D. degrees at Louisiana State University.  Both joined the ETSU faculty in 1982.

“Jean and Ed Stead continue to enrich the management literature with a perspective that firmly roots the economy and its organizations within the constraints of the physical world,” said Herman Daly, who is known as the founding father of ecological economics and is Jean Stead’s former professor.