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SYNOPSIS We report the results of a survey of 178 corporate responsibility officers designed to explore how accountants can add value to sustainability initiatives. Specifically, we examine how three areas of accounting expertise (risk identification and measurement, financial reporting, and independent review/assurance) contribute to the strategic integration of sustainability initiatives (cf. Porter and Kramer 2006; IIRC 2011). Our results indicate that accounting professionals are rarely involved in sustainability initiatives, but their involvement is highly associated with strategic integration. This finding suggests that increased involvement likely would provide significant benefits to organizations and their stakeholders. We use these and other important insights into a series of research questions for future accounting or interdisciplinary research in sustainability. These insights about accountants' ability to enhance the strategic integration of sustainability initiatives also should be of interest to accounting and consulting firms as they design and market their sustainability services. Data Availability: Data are available upon request.

This paper investigates the relation between the value of a firm and employee attitudes on the firm's workplace quality—workplace attitudes. Workplace attitude refers to recognition of those organizational characteristics that enhance employee work experiences and assist employees in balancing their jobs and personal lives. Using inclusion on Fortune's annual list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” as a proxy for successful efforts in creating high workplace attitudes, we compare the market values of listed firms to the market values of nonlisted firms in the same industry matched on earnings. After controlling for book value, past operational performance, and research and development expense, we find that market values of listed firms exceed those of matched firms. We also provide evidence that firms ranked high on the Fortune list receive higher market values than those ranked lower on the list. Finally, the two-year forward market returns for listed firms exceed the returns for the matched sample while the two-year prior returns are not significantly different between the two groups. This result suggests that market performance does not determine inclusion on the Fortune list.

Strategic-systems auditing (SSA) approaches require auditors to perform analyses of their clients at two levels (i.e., strategic and business-process levels) when conducting audits (e.g., Bell et al. 2002; Lemon et al. 2000). One advantage of using SSA approaches is that through these analyses, auditors gain a complex systems understanding of the client. This understanding enhances decision making in part by recognizing that small actions can have big effects that increase overall business risk (Jacobson 2001; Richmond 2000). This study examines how the two levels of analysis in SSA impact auditor judgments regarding small changes in a business process that can have big (risk-increasing) effects. Specifically, we predict that when strategic-positioning information (contained within the strategic-level analysis) indicates a client is typical of others in its industry, information at the business-process level regarding a small problem in a business process will be weighted less than when the strategic-positioning information indicates the client is atypical. Results support this contention. This behavior may have implications for the effectiveness of SSA approaches under certain conditions.

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