Corporate sustainability

About: Corporate sustainability is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3517 publications have been published within this topic receiving 94075 citations.

Corporate governance and sustainable business conduct—Effects of board monitoring effectiveness and stakeholder engagement on corporate sustainability performance and disclosure choices

Abstract: This study posits that, in the absence of extensive mandatory regulation and auditing, differences in internal and external corporate governance (CG) mechanisms will explain variations in choices concerning corporate sustainability reporting and the interrelated and underlying corporate sustainability performance (CSP). Specifically, we explore whether board monitoring effectiveness as a major internal CG mechanism and stakeholder engagement as a key external CG mechanism are positively associated with sustainability reporting quality (SRQ), compliance with generally accepted sustainability reporting standards (SRC) and guidelines, and CSP for a sample of Dutch firms that have voluntarily disclosed sustainability reports during the years 2012–2016. In addition to these direct effects, we also investigate the potential indirect effects of the CG mechanisms on SRQ and SRC via CSP and distinguish between nonlagged and lag effects. Using structural equation modeling, our results show that, in the short term, monitoring effectiveness positively affects SRQ and SRC. Stakeholder engagement positively affects SRQ and SRC in the short term and is positively related to SRQ via CSP in the longer term, indicating that active stakeholders, over time, may drive companies toward more sustainable business conduct. Finally, the findings that CSP is positively related to SRQ but negatively related to SRC provide further support for signaling and legitimacy theory, respectively. Companies with superior CSP disclose high‐quality information on CSP to signal the firm's superior sustainability performance, whereas poor performing companies legitimize their inferior CSP by complying with more reporting standards, rather than by directly improving their underlying CSP.

The Role of Quality Management & Innovativeness on Green Performance

Abstract: Recently, many firms have been focusing on sustainable manufacturing. The manager has to understand the social requirement of concern for environmental protection. This study develops a model to enhance the understanding of how market orientation, quality management, and innovativeness assist Thailand's food industry in attaining its optimal green performance, and to assess the mediating effect of quality management and innovativeness on market orientation and green performance. A questionnaire was developed and employed to gather data from 178 managers in the food industry. Data analysis is performed using the structural equation modelling approach. The results indicate that market orientation, quality management, and innovativeness positively and significantly affect green performance, both directly and indirectly. Moreover, quality management and innovativeness have a partial mediator effect on market orientation and green performance. This finding illustrates that Thailand's food industry could achieve green performance by developing market‐driven, quality management capacity and innovation development. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Matter of opinion: Exploring the socio-political nature of materiality disclosures in sustainability reporting

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the socio-political role of materiality assessment in sustainability reporting literature and discuss the potential of materiality assessment to advance more inclusive accounting and reporting practices, in particular critical dialogic accounting.,Drawing on literature on the concept of materiality together with insights from stakeholder engagement, commensuration and critical dialogic accounting the paper analyses disclosure on materiality in sustainability reports. Empirically, qualitative content analysis is used to analyse 44 sustainability reports from the leading companies.,The authors argue that, first, the technic-rational approach to materiality portrays the assessment as a neutral and value-free measurement, and second, the materiality matrix presents the multiple stakeholders as having a unified understanding of what is considered important in corporate sustainability. Thus, the technic-rational approach to the materiality assessment, reinforced with the use of the matrix is a value-laden judgement of what matters in corporate sustainability and narrows down rather than opens up the complexity of the assessment of material sustainability issues, stakeholder engagement and the societal pursuit of sustainable development.,The understandings and implications of the concept of materiality are ambiguous and wide-reaching, as, through constituting the legitimised set of claims and information on corporate sustainable performance, it impacts our understanding of sustainable development at large, and affects the corporate and policy-level transition towards sustainability. Exploring insights from critical dialogic accounting help us to elaborate on the conceptions and practical implications of materiality assessment that enhance stakeholder engagement in a democratic, rather than managerial, spirit.

Unmasking Corporate Sustainability at the Project Level: Exploring the Influence of Institutional Logics and Individual Agency

Abstract: Due to their consolidated nature, corporate sustainability reports often mask the evolution of organizations’ sustainability initiatives. Thus, to more fully understand the environmental performance of an organization, it is essential to examine the experiences of specific projects and how they relate to corporate sustainability. Based on case studies of green projects in four different organizations, we find that it is difficult to determine the environmental impact of a project a priori, even in cases where environmental considerations are included as part of the initial project scope. Instead, the decision to integrate environmentally favorable elements into projects is a dynamically occurring interaction between competing institutional logics and organizational identities, which create windows of opportunity for individual agency. During these windows, individuals may engage in reinforcing microprocesses that support traditional practices, or invoke enabling microprocesses to facilitate green decision-making, consistent with ecosystem logics. The process model developed in this paper provides a new perspective on the temporal and contextual dimensions of environmental championship behaviors, and sheds light on otherwise puzzling results such as why organizations with strong environmental orientations continue to struggle with delivering projects with strong positive environmental impacts.