Yannis A. Phillis is a guest contributor. He is Professor of Engineering at UCLA and the Technology University of Crete.
The following is adopted from:
“Fuzzy Measurement of Sustainability,” by Y. A. Phillis and V. S. Kouikoglou, Nova Publishers, NY, 2009, by permission.
An organization is an entity or purposeful structure with boundaries that separate it from its environment. According to Webster’s dictionary it is an administrative and functional structure (as a business or a political party). An organization pursues certain goals such as education (this is a university) or production of goods and services if it is a corporation. Organizations interact with their environment, physical, biological and social, they affect it and become affected by it. It is quite natural then that organizations play an important role in the sustainability of a region or country.
A company might use production technologies that are environmentally friendly and continuously strive toward improving them or it might disregard such technologies to enhance short term profits. A company might resort to friendly
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