Two Dimensions of Corporate Sustainability Assessment: Towards a Comprehensive Framework

Abstract

Over the last years, many approaches have emerged that attempt to measure the contribution of firms to sustainable development, i.e. corporate sustainability. Our review of existing methodologies for the assessment of corporate sustainability reveals two major shortcomings. First, value creation as a core condition for sustainability as well as for further contributions to economic sustainability is often ignored in these assessments, suggesting that financial and non‐financial organizational processes are separable. Second, existing approaches fail to differentiate between the actual contribution of a firm to sustainability on the one hand, and governance‐related features aimed at attaining this contribution on the other. We argue that the implementation of sustainability‐oriented organizational structures and managerial instruments alone does not necessarily guarantee sustainability performance. Therefore, besides the dimension of current sustainability performance, we introduce the notion of sustainability governance as a second distinct dimension of corporate sustainability assessment. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Triangulating Environmental Performance: What Do Corporate Social Responsibility Ratings Really Capture?

“…Second, process measures indicate the efforts a company invests in attempting to mitigate its environmental impacts. Although process measures represent a potential for improvement in outcome performance, there is no guarantee that such improvements will indeed materialize (Schneider & Meins, 2012). It is therefore unclear whether the two dimensions can or should be used independently by socially responsible investors.…”

The sweet spot in sustainability: a framework for corporate assessment in sugar manufacturing

“…As claimed by Schneider and Meins (2012), previous studies focus on existing performances without considering contributions from governance-related features. In their research, therefore, sustainability governance is incorporated into an assessment framework as the potential to pursue corporate sustainability.…”

“…During the past decade, some studies propose additional aspects of organisational performance, such as leadership, innovation or communication, to extend the TBL (Hubbard 2009;Keeble, Topiol, and Berkeley 2003;Labuschagne, Brent, and Van Erck 2005;Schneider and Meins 2012;Staniškis and Arbačiauskas 2009;Székely and Knirsch 2005). This indicates that corporate sustainability is still a tentative topic in which its structure has not yet become mature or robust.…”

“…The industrial sector, often blamed as a major source of environmental degradation and social deprivation issues, is required to demonstrate their responsibility by assessing and reporting performance with respect to sustainable development within their organisations (Azapagic 2003;Azapagic and Perdan 2000). Recent literature shows that the number of companies which regularly report their progress towards sustainable development has been increasing every year (Hubbard 2009;KPMG 2011;Lozano and Huisingh 2011;Schneider and Meins 2012). However, sustainability assessment is complex because it is related to a large number of criteria, both quantitative and qualitative aspects, as well as uncertainties in scoring and assessing.…”

Integration of Sustainability into the Corporate Strategy

“…Once the suitable indicators are aligned with the planned actions and thus with the strategic objectives, the monitoring via the usage of operational data has to be realised. Business intelligence and reporting tools that are only capable of visualising performance indicators are no longer sufficient for capturing the complex requirements of a comprehensive sustainability approach (Schneider and Meins 2012). Moreover, a solution for network sustainability management and its evaluation is required for balancing economic, ecological and social dimensions (Wilding et al 2012).…”