Ethical issues and challenges in sustainability research
Research #ethics is important for scientific integrity and cooperation between science and society. It is necessary for the researcher to pursue the important research goals with consideration of ethical principles. If these principles are not followed, the trust in the obtained research will be lost; Even if valuable research is done, it will not be noticed. It can cover all topics including #sustainability.
Most sustainability research focuses on one aspect of #technology, and that is industrial technology. While confirming the importance of this dimension, it should be noted that #administrative #technology should not be neglected because sustainable development is not a one-dimensional goal, and all sub-systems must be developed together. The relation between #sustainable #innovation and #customer #satisfaction in financial institutions is one example of administrative technology. As regards valuable research has been done in the field of sustainable innovation, rarely attention has been paid to the issue of customer satisfaction.
Can customer satisfaction be effective in achieving the goal of sustainable innovation?
There are some ethical challenges in this subject as follows:
1. Although sustainable innovation is one of the goals set by the United Nations (#UN) in the Sustainable Development Goals (#SDGs) and most countries have accepted this set of goals, however, until all countries have proven their practical adherence to these goals, there cannot be much confidence in the goals were fulfilled. And this is a significant challenge for this research because it is not possible to research in financial institutions such as banks about a topic that has not yet been fully accepted.
2. Sustainable innovation is a radical innovation that strongly affects business profitability. The market naturally resists this type of innovation because the nature of the market is supply and demand, and if something were to upset this balance, it would face market resistance. Banks, as part of the money market, are not exempt from this issue and will resist the decrease in profitability.
3. Sustainable innovation in the first stages needs support policies that governments are expected to implement these policies. This is while the governments may face an extended period of recession and inflation and practically do not have enough motivation to support. In this case, banks are not willing to transfer capital to the sustainable innovation market which has an equivocalness future.
4. The ambiguities and risks related to sustainable innovation make the bank managers unwilling to accept the risk of necessary research and collaboration. They never want to be exposed to the criticism of sustainability data analysis. However, to solve this problem, education can be used to make officials optimistic about the future of sustainability.
5. Like other research done by both qualitative and quantitative methods, the research in this subject is forecasted to face with challenges like the availability of the statistical population for sampling, cooperation for interviewing and completing the questionnaire. Maybe using advanced research methods can partially remove this damage.
6. The generalization of the results is one of the important challenges that this kind of research is facing because there are vast differences in beliefs of sustainability policies.