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This book discusses reliability and other related issues, such as reporting and decision-making, pertinent to sustainability and corporate responsibility reporting practices. Investors, governments, and NGOs expect businesses to report their environmental and social performance. This information is used to legislate, regulate industries, and guide the investment of billions of dollars through pensions and mutual funds. But can we trust these measurements? In order to answer this question, the editors and contributors, all academic thought leaders from a variety of fields, offer a set of reflections on problems that various stakeholders might be exposed to. These problems are mainly due to a lack of standardized reporting practices and guidelines, and inconsistencies in measurements used for the valuation of corporate sustainability performance indicators. This book is of great interest to students, scholars, and stakeholders to help comprehend the importance of accounting on sustainability practices for decision-making and measures therein, but also the reliability risks involved in these measurements. Thus, it moves away from simply pushing for more sustainability reporting towards a more critical discussion of measurement issues and potential consequences of the aforementioned problems to different fields such as finance, marketing, or strategy.
List of contents
Chapter 1. What is wrong with making profits?.- Chapter 2. Measuring companies multicontextual contribution to a sustainable development.- Chapter 3. Definition and measurement of sustainability and CSR: circumstances of perceptual misalignments.- Chapter 4. "What I say is not necessarily what I do": a critical conceptual analysis of the (missing) link between corporate sustainability reporting and social impact.- Chapter 5. Blended finance and the SDGS: using the spectrum of capital to de-risk business model transformation.- Chapter 6. Responsible business and integrated stakeholder reporting: towards a stakeholder model for integrated reporting of ESG and SDG.- Chapter 7. Social representations of responsible management: an alternative measure of sustainability?.- Chapter 8. Stakeholder engagement and materiality assessments in sustainability reporting.- Chapter 9. The performance-reporting gap: a key to understanding the relevance of sustainability reporting information to stakeholders.- Chapter 10. Addressing challenges to labour rights reporting on global value chains: social governance mechanisms as a way forward.- Chapter 11. CSR ratings in the presence of a former rating agency analyst: evidence from LinkedIn.- Chapter 12. Organizational culture and the moving target of corporate sustainability: an exploratory investigation.- Chapter 13. A cautionary tale: lessons from the strategic use of financial reporting.- Chapter 14. Corporate sustainability disclosure standards must emphasize outcomes over policies.- Chapter 15. ESG data challenges: user discretion is advised.- Chapter 16. Altruism in investor preferences: a catalyst for the green transition.- Chapter 17. Self-induced versus structured corporate social responsibility: the indian context.- Chapter 18. Measuring sustainability in india: a comparative assessment of frameworks and key challenges.- Chapter 19. Does hypercompetition foster corporate social responsibility? A research framework of the hypercompetitive effects on ESG performance.- Chapter 20. The integration of ESG ratings in Danish pension funds: interviews with pension fund managers.
