Al-Shaer Habiba, Hussainey Khaled
Newcastle University, Business School, 5 Barrack Road, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 4SE, UK.
Portsmouth Business School, University of Portsmouth, Portland Street, Portsmouth, PO1 3DE, UK.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Jun 1;311:114883. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114883. Epub 2022 Mar 11.
We explore Landrum and Ohsowski (2018)'s development model, which positions each company's sustainability reporting with multiple worldviews of corporate sustainability. We investigate the impact of sustainability report communicative actions on corporate sustainability performance. We argue that companies that comply with the reporting guidelines and adopt the business case for corporate sustainability may not capture all sustainability aspects, and therefore may not have a real impact on sustainability performance. Employing a computer-based textual analysis on a sample of UK firms that published sustainability reports during the period 2014-2018, we find that sustainability reports that communicate the message that firms understand sustainability to mean maintaining production and consumption patterns within resources capacity of the planet and coexisting in harmony with nature are likely to have a positive effect on sustainability performance. On the other hand, communicating compliance and the business-centred approach as their understanding of sustainability will negatively affect sustainability performance. Our findings offer important implications for companies who need to change their approach towards sustainability reporting and shift from the business case approach to advance to the next stage of sustainability reporting which should guide corporate decisions and actions.
我们探究了兰德鲁姆和奥索夫斯基（2018年）的发展模型，该模型将每家公司的可持续发展报告置于企业可持续发展的多种世界观之中。我们研究了可持续发展报告沟通行动对企业可持续发展绩效的影响。我们认为，那些遵循报告指南并采用企业可持续发展商业案例的公司可能无法涵盖所有可持续发展方面，因此可能对可持续发展绩效没有实际影响。通过对2014年至2018年期间发布可持续发展报告的英国公司样本进行基于计算机的文本分析，我们发现，传达企业将可持续发展理解为在地球资源能力范围内维持生产和消费模式并与自然和谐共存这一信息的可持续发展报告，可能会对可持续发展绩效产生积极影响。另一方面，将合规和以商业为中心的方法作为其对可持续发展的理解进行沟通，将对可持续发展绩效产生负面影响。我们的研究结果为那些需要改变可持续发展报告方式并从商业案例方法转向推进到可持续发展报告下一阶段（该阶段应指导企业决策和行动）的公司提供了重要启示。
