“Sustainable Sustainability” and Value Creation: Elements of Planning, Management, Control and Reporting
The uncertainties characterizing the competitive arena, the changes in social dynamics and sustainable regulations have swept away the traditional views about firms’ competitiveness, survival, and profitability. The strengthened attention towards social and environmental issues has pushed firms to place sustainability concerns at the top of their strategic agendas, progressively conforming business, organizational, and governance models. The assumption that a cause-and-effect process links the economic growth of firms with the welfare external environment, has involved scholars and practitioners to increase both financial and non-financial disclosure to improve the engagement with their stakeholders. Through multidimensional systems, firms engage to seize the value creation, in its various forms and configurations, as well as the action of various factors. Moreover, the achievement of international Sustainable Development Goals requires the joint collaboration of scholars, practitioners, and regulation authorities. The academic debate on these themes has determined progressive verticalization on topics by extensively offering different paradigms and interpretations of sustainability in terms of theories, methodologies, approaches, and outcomes. The contributions of this issue of Management Control authoritatively enrich this debate. The volume provides the readers with a multi-faceted perspective on sustainability and its impact on firms’ operations, organizational and governance models, and disclosure. The included papers emphasize the role of sustainability in increasing the firms’ value creation process and support an evolution of sustainable business practices and disclosure considering simultaneously the accountability to a wide range of firm’s internal and external actors.
Keywords: Sustainability, Value creation, Sustainable Development Goals, Corporate disclosure, Performance measurement systems
