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The "business case for sustainability" is a notion often referenced in the corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility literature. Whereas some see sustainability and the business case as contradictions and thus emphasize the existence of trade-offs, others highlight how (potential) business cases can be created by managing ecological, social, and economic aspects. Both views have in common that the "business case" is implicitly or explicitly seen as creating financial performance, often for one group of stakeholders, only. The fact that a business case is not a given phenomenon but has to be co-created in the exchange between and with contributions from various stakeholders has so far not been analysed in depth. By taking a stakeholder theory perspective, this article extends the existing research on what business and a business case are about and analyses the understanding of business cases for sustainability and how they can be created with and by stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with the development of environmental management accounting (EMA) in the past decade, a variety of management accounting and control tools have been designed and implemented to improve the measurement and management of corporate environmental performance and information. While the importance of EMA to corporate sustainability has been increasingly acknowledged, extant literature has drawn little attention on assessing and understanding EMA application and its effectiveness on the quality of carbon emission management and disclosure. Using data gathered of 114 large firms in the US, Germany, Australia and Japan, we find that many firms have applied some EMA tools, yet only a few have applied the full range of EMA tools. The empirical analysis reveals that EMA application has a significantly positive impact on both corporate carbon management and disclosure quality. Further analysis specifies that audit and benchmarking tools as well as control tools have significant effects on carbon management and disclosure, while for measurement tools no significant effects could be observed. Based on the results, implications are developed for management education and practitioners, which can help managers to make better informed choices for the application of EMA tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic debate why and how companies are dealing with sustainability is dominated by two main arguments-the profit-seeking and the legitimacy-seeking view. While the first argues that companies (only) establish sustainability management measures if this helps to increase their economic success, others emphasize that companies predominantly react on societal pressure dealing with sustainability (only) to secure legitimacy. Whereas both lines of argument have gained a lot of attention in academia, little is known about their relative importance in shaping corporate practice. This papers aims to fill this gap with an empirical analysis of corporate practices of large companies in ten countries worldwide. To capture the organizations' rationale in sustainability management practice, we systematically applied various measures related to actors and operational activities focusing on the companies' intention to pursue sustainability management, the integration of sustainability management to the core business, and the actual implementation of related measures. Overall the findings indicate that seeking legitimacy dominates corporate sustainability management practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the huge global environmental problems and their political and economic impacts, companies are challenged to improve their performance with regard to issues such as climate change. To successfully reduce corporate environmental impacts, management not only needs to develop environmental strategies, it also has to use effective sustainability management tools for their implementation. There are many studies reported in the literature on sustainability management tools such as life cycle assessments or sustainability reports. However, with few exceptions little is known about the efficacy of these tools. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data from the largest companies of five industrialized countries and empirically test the impact of implementing sustainability management tools on key dimensions of corporate environmental performance. The findings show that the implementation of sustainability management tools does reduce environmental impacts per unit of revenue. However, different groups of tools are found to be effective for different purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementing corporate sustainability strategies requires knowledge and application of sustainability management tools. While much progress has been made in developing such tools in both small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large companies, the literature claims company size positively affects application. However, the role of knowledge as amediating factor has not yet been investigated. Using the knowledge-based view as a theoretical underpinning, this paper draws on empirical survey data from SMEs and large companies in Germany. It analyzes how company size affects the degree of knowledge and application of sustainability management tools. Even though the results reaffirm that SMEs know and apply significantly less tools, company size does not influence the share of tools applied once they are known. Thus, knowledge is identified as a key difference between SMEs and large companies as well as an important mediator to promote sustainability management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature claims that corporate sustainable development is a cross-functional challenge, which requires all functional units to be involved. However, it remains uncertain to what extent and in which way different corporate functions are actually involved in corporate sustainability management. To bridge this research gap, our paper draws on a concept of involvement introduced in the field of consumer behavior. Based on this previous research, our paper distinguishes two components of involvement: first, a cognitive-affective component, incorporating being affected by sustainability issues and being supportive of corporate sustainability; and second, a behavioral component, represented by the application of sustainability management tools. We use this concept to empirically analyze the involvement of corporate functions in sustainability management and find considerable differences in large German companies. Whereas public relations and strategic management are heavily involved, finance, accounting and management control appear not to be involved. A multinomial logistic regression shows that the cognitive-affective component significantly influences the behavioral component, with a functional unit being affected influencing the application of tools the most. Building on the model proposed, the paper provides implications on how to increase a functional unit's involvement in sustainability management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]