Nanotechnology, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Sustainable Business Practice: Towards an Assurance-Based Risk Governance Framework

The continuing development and deployment of nanotechnologies offer an extensive and seemingly continually expanding range of business opportunities, but these technologies can also generate potential challenges for a wide range of stakeholders. Although there appears to be a clear consensus on the potential of nanotechnologies, little has been published on how specific companies are tackling the challenges associated with their use. This study adopts an inductive, qualitative methodology based on an analysis of existing literature, company websites, and international standards, to address this gap in the research literature. The paper explores how some of the largest companies working with nanotechnologies publicly address these challenges through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches and examines the extent to which nanotechnologies feature in these approaches to establish organizational trustworthiness. Building on these findings, and with reference to relevant international standards such as ISAE 3000 and ISO/IEC TS 5723, the article proposes an assurance-based framework to foster verifiable trustworthiness by assessing and managing the impact of nanotechnologies in the corporate environment and to guide corporate governance and regulatory compliance. This will be of interest and relevance to business practitioners and researchers as findings suggest that awareness of the potential impacts of nanotechnologies remains limited, as reflected in their scant recognition in many CSR policies and related activities.