Measuring Sustainability and CSR: From Reporting to Decision-Making

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.

Slobodan Kacanski obtained his PhD degree in social sciences from Roskilde University, Denmark, in 2017. He is currently an Associate Professor of Accounting at Roskilde University and the member of a Melbourne-based Consortium of Experts in Social Network Analysis. In addition, he is a member of the European Accounting Association and the Danish Audit Research Network. Slobodan has developed his research profile of understanding the role of accounting and auditing as social and organisational practice across various contexts, and his interest in social networks and accounting contributes to the accounting literature on the understanding of the complex and dynamic social relationships between accounting, auditing, corporate governance and sustainability. He has published several articles in renowned international academic journals, including Corporate Governance and European Accounting Review.

Johannes Kabderian Dreyer earnedhis bachelor’s degree in Economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 2004. He completed his master's degree in Business Finance at the same university in 2007 financed by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ). In 2011 he defended his doctorate in Financial Economics in Bavaria at the Ingolstadt School of Management (Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, KU) financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Today, he is Associate professor of Financial Economics at Roskilde University. The main research interests of the author are within Macroeconomics and Financial Economics. More specifically, main topics in Financial Economics are Banking, Asset Pricing and Behavioral Finance. Main topics in Macroeconomics are the study of Optimal Currency Areas and the economics of the Euro.

Kristian J. Sund is an expert on business model innovation and organizational cognition,as well as more generally organizations and strategic management. He is Professor of Strategic Management at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has extensive experience teaching strategy topics at undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and MBA levels and has been involved in executive education for over fifteen years, both as an educator and a program director. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, twice winner of best paper awards from the British Academy of Management, and his work has also appeared in the Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management. His research has appeared in a variety of journals, including MIT Sloan Management Review, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and Studies in Higher Education. He has edited ten books and is the current series editor of New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition (Emerald). Kristian holds a Doctorate in Economics (Dr. Sc. économiques), with a specialization in Management, and M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Lausanne and a M.A. in Society, Science and Technology from EPFL, where he also completed his post-doc.