The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an urgent call for action by all countries that provide a global framework for achieving global development while balancing social, economic, and environmental sustainability. SDGs are addressed to all actors in society, but both academia and professional recognize the particular importance of businesses. However, research is still needed to understand the role of companies as sustainable development agents. Relying on Scopus database consultation, the current research adopts an interdisciplinary systematic literature review to investigate, analyze, and present state-of-the-art academic literature on the role of businesses in tackling SDGs. The final sample comprises 101 papers published between 2015 and 2020. It provides evidence that the main topics discussed by scholars are related to aspects of strategy execution. Recognizing different streams that are currently unexplored-despite strictly related to strategic business activities and to the sustainable development as a whole-the study provides many insights for future research on business and SDGs.

Directive 2014/95/EU (the EU Directive) requires large companies to disclose information on the way they operate and manage social and environmental challenges, thus shifting the disclosure of non-financial information (NFI) from the voluntary to the mandatory realm. Building on the idea that regulatory changes can shape stakeholder expectations, we hypothesized that legitimacy (agency) theory's ability to predict NFI disclosure after the implementation of the EU Directive, and hence after NFI disclosure became mandatory, would decrease (increase). By relying on a handcollected data set measuring NFI disclosure, we have found that legitimacy theory maintains its predictive ability in the new mandatory setting, while agency theory's predictive ability partially increases.

This article focuses on the sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC) as a performance measurement and management control tool that can play an essential role in driving companies towards sustainability goals. According to previous studies, research on the SBSC can be structured into the stages of design, implementation, use and evolution. This study aims to systematise knowledge on the use stage. Specifically, it addresses the determinants affecting SBSC use, the approaches that companies employ in SBSC application and the outcomes it generates in terms of the effects on sustainability control and management. The research was conducted through a systematic literature review considering 65 articles published in ABS‐ranked journals in the period 2000–2020. Findings add to the body of literature on the SBSC in management and accounting fields, providing an overview of current research, mapping research streams, indicating potential future research avenues and highlighting some managerial implications.

The recent EU Directive on nonfinancial information (NFI) disclosure allows Member States some discretion regarding its implementation. More specifically, it allows countries to decide whether: (a) information assurance is compulsory; (b) companies can waive NFI disclosure because of possible competitive harms (safe harbor); and (c) fines can be imposed on companies not disclosing NFI. We empirically test the impact of different implementation strategies on NFI quantity and quality, and we find that regulations providing incentives ('carrots') are more effective than regulations imposing costs ('sticks'). More specifically, while mandatory assurance and safe harbor have a positive impact on NFI quantity, fines do not. Our results contribute to the literature on NFI disclosure and inform regulators on the effectiveness of different implementation strategies.

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Relatively little research has addressed questions on how companies integrate corporate social responsibility (CSR) and management control, and this study attempts to respond to recent calls for further investigation. Taking the perspective, advanced in the extant literature, that CSR can be regarded as a form of management control, the study has the objective to show how a socially responsible initiative, such as the implementation of an employee welfare plan undertaken by a SME, can address control issues. In particular, the company has designed the employee welfare plan as an incentive system. The study adopts an interventionist research (IVR) approach to accomplish with the research objective, and the results of the interventionist case study are interpreted based on the Merchant and Van der Stede object-of-control framework. In particular, results indicate that the implementation of the welfare plan has enabled the application of different types of control and provided incentive-related benefits, suggesting the potential impact of CSR as a management control device.

Worldwide governance organizations and regulators have recently called for more enhanced disclosures about how organizations manage risks. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is recognized as a value-contributing best practice even when legal standards do not require it (Whitman in Risk Manag Insur Rev 18(2):161-197, 2015), but public disclosure on such a process is not generally mandatory. In Italy emphasis on risk disclosure started in 2008 but it was the 2011 revision of the Corporate Governance (CG) code for listed companies to ask for the board commitment in disclosing, within the CG report, about the main internal control and risk management system's characteristics (Borsa Italiana in Codice di Autodisciplina, 2011). Given the proprietary nature of risk information in addition to the Italian capital market characteristics (small capitalization and presence of a dominant shareholder) and the lack of any mandate for what specific aspects board should disclose, the study aims at investigating a potential variation between private and public disclosure on ERM. Relying on the ERM concepts provided by the COSO framework (2004) the author submitted a survey seeking information about ERM practices within Italian listed companies. Such a private information is compared to public CG reports released by the same companies. The comparison shows companies tend to privately reveal a more effective ERM process than the one they publicly disclose. An examination of CG and firm's risk variables potentially determining higher variation-i.e. information inconsistency-supports proprietary costs theory rather than agency theory expectations. Thus showing the limits of voluntary disclosure dealing with risk management systems. The study might have international policy implications.