Exploring the Strategic Integration of Sustainability Initiatives: Opportunities for Accounting Research

Abstract

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.

Multinationals’ Accountability on Sustainability: The Evolution of Third-party Assurance of Sustainability Reports

“…Shi et al 2012), recent accounting studies examined country-specific (macro-level) characteristics (such as a macroeconomic, socio-historical, cultural and legal environment) or firm-specific (micro-level) variables (such as ownership structure, corporate governance or financial leverage) as drivers of corporate financial reporting or auditor's choice (see Dong and Stettler 2011 for a review). Building upon initial evidence from our paper and previous studies (Simnett et al 2009;Kolk and Perego 2010;Ballou et al 2012), the sustainability assurance setting could serve as empirical context to simultaneously test the relative importance of country-versus firm-determinants of (nonfinancial) auditing services in an international context. The approach recently suggested by Dong and Stettler (2011) to apply hierarchical modelling aiming at disentangling multi-level drivers seems very suitable for this context and could be informative for both CSR/business ethics and accounting academic audiences.…”

“…We argue that the current institutional framework prevalent in the CSR/business ethics literature could be complemented by theories in strategy (such as the resource-based view of the firm) and accounting (such as voluntary disclosure theory) as plausible richer explanations of variability in IAS adoption (cf. Simnett et al 2009;Kolk and Perego 2010;Boiral and Gendron 2011;Smith et al 2011;Ballou et al 2012).…”

Audit Structure, Time Pressure and Judgment Accuracy: A Comparison between Strategic System Audit and Traditional Audit

“…Borthick et al (2012) found that a graphical representation of business processes increases auditor"s accuracy when assessing the audit risk for the client compared to the absence of such a tool. Ballou et al (2012) argued that enhancing the process integration increases the ability to define the risks and the understanding of future events. O"Donnell and Schultz (2003) investigated the task complexity between the two audit methods and provided evidence that SSA is less complex than TA.…”

Accounting Education: The Role of Universities in Imparting Sustainability Accounting Knowledge to the Stakeholders through Industry Linkages

“…It further states that knowledge first manifest itself at social level (Vygotsky, 1978) before it narrow down to individuals (Kauchak & Eggen, 2012).Social constructivists maintain that knowledge can be passed to the society through the sharing or collaboration which cannot be possible if individuals are left to reason and judge for themselves. Individuals which this paper refers to as stakeholders understand phenomena by interacting with other individuals especially the practitioners of a field and the scholars (Amineh & Hanieh, 2015). Stakeholder in accounting use accounting information reported to make economic decisions, this means that they may make wrong decisions if they are not properly informed.…”