Assessing Corporate Sustainability Through Ratings: Challenges and Their Causes

Assessing corporate sustainability is increasingly practice-relevant, not least because the capital market and other markets have been paying growing attention to the topic. Recently, ratings have become an important assessment approach and nowadays a variety of organizations and financial service providers conduct their own ratings. Yet, despite their growing popularity, ratings are criticized in research and practice. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to systematize the challenges that corporate sustainability ratings face: lack of standardization, lack of credibility of information, bias, tradeoffs, lack of transparency, and lack of independence. Furthermore, the paper discusses the causes of these challenges and suggests possible ways to improve the reliability of ratings

Nachhaltigkeitsmanagement auf dem Vormarsch

Was ist der Stand des Nachhaltigkeitsmanagements in Wissenschaft und Praxis? Dieser Frage geht das Corporate Sustainability Barometer nach, das vom Centre for Sustainability Management der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg in Kooperation mit PricewaterhouseCoopers erstellt wurde

Corporate Sustainability in International ComparisonState of Practice, Opportunities and Challenges /

XXII, 255 p. 124 illus., 18 illus. in color.onlin

Involving Corporate Functions: Who Contributes to Sustainable Development?

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