New challenges for corporate sustainability reporting: United Nations' 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and the sustainable development goals

Abstract

Complying with the requirements of sustainability development is a very high priority for the business community. The United Nations' 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UN_SDGs) pose new challenges for firms, which have to adjust their operations and strategies to the requirements of SDGs. In this context, this paper aims to develop a methodological framework for evaluating the level of alignment of corporate sustainability reporting practices with the scope of UN_SDGs. Based on disclosure topics from Global Reporting Initiative and a scoring system, an evaluation framework was developed in order to assess the quality of information published in sustainability reports with respect to each UN_SDG. An empirical analysis was performed in a sample of sustainability reports in order to examine the structure and the applicability of the proposed methodological framework. The outcomes of the empirical analysis reflect some implications for future research on the UN_SDG reporting practices.

Crypto‐economy and new sustainable business models: Reflections and projections using a case study analysis

“…The literature shows great interest in understanding the sustainability drivers, as means toward a more sustainable‐oriented state (Lozano, 2015; Peralta, Carrillo‐Hermosilla, & Crescente, 2019), and a stimulus for corporate entrepreneurship (Mahfuz Ashraf et al, 2019; Morrish, Miles, & Polonsky, 2011). The recent introduction of UN's 17 SDGs has pushed organizations even more to the need to merge sustainability into their businesses (Poddar, Narula, & Zutshi, 2019; Presch, Dal Mas, Piccolo, Sinik, & Cobianchi, 2020; Rosati & Faria, 2019; Secundo, Ndou, Del Vecchio, & De Pascale, 2020; Tsalis, Malamateniou, Koulouriotis, & Nikolaou, 2020). Interestingly, according to Ruzza, Dal Mas, Massaro, and Bagnoli (2020) “emerging technologies regularly serve as enabling forces for economic, social, and business transformation” and can, therefore, be an external factor that contributes developing new SMBs.…”

One More Tweet: Firms Challenge a Sustainable Future

“…In line with calls for research (e.g., Bakkalbasi and Goertzen, 2014;Mani et al, 2018;Tsalis et al, 2020), we aimed to accomplish our study's goals by performing content analysis, as it offers the advantage of focusing on common issues. Thus, the representativeness of the results is supported by the analysis itself, while the examples we provided in the second part clarify and provide a more concrete understanding of some issues.…”

“…In detail, the authors analysed the frequency of keywords among the different stages of corporate sustainability as content categories proposed by Landrum (2015) himself. Calls for research on sustainability through content analysis were addressed by scholars addressing the need of overcoming data selection bias (Mani et al, 2018) as well as dealing with wider datasets (Tsalis et al, 2020) Therefore, our second research question is as follows:…”

“…In line with the aforementioned calls for research (e.g., Bakkalbasi and Goertzen, 2014;Mani et al, 2018;Tsalis et al, 2020), we investigate the content of the communication on sustainability with a two-fold aim: firstly, a comparison between exact words and stemmed words; secondly, a description of communication efforts and topics that firms opted for when dealing with sustainability. Thus, the methodological contribution would provide suggestions about the advantages of performing the analysis in one of the two ways, while the research context offers insights into sustainability reporting.…”

Introducing fundamental accountability principles in sustainability reporting assessment: A cross‐sectoral analysis from the Greek business sector

“…Publishing CSR reports is a rising trend in the business world. The reasoning behind this initiative lies in the fact that businesses seek modern and innovative tools to strengthen their corporate image, enhance their performance and, eventually, gain a competitive advantage against competitors (Adams & Frost, 2008;Carroll & Shabana, 2010; Karagiannis, Vouros, Skouloudis, & Evangelinos, 2019;Porter & Kramer, 2006;Tsalis, Malamateniou, Koulouriotis, & Nikolaou, 2020).…”