Abstract
Management accountants have proven to be pivotal for introducing new forms of accounting and reporting in companies to support managers in their decision-making process. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the role management accountants play in sustainability accounting and reporting to understand how research is progressing, point out its focus, critique its developments, and finally, identify future research avenues. Results reveal that, to date, management accountants’ level of involvement is lower than that of non-accountants and that there is a consensus in academia and practice that a more significant involvement of management accountants is needed for promoting homogenization of sustainability accounting and reporting in companies and its more widespread diffusion and use among managers, thus embedding sustainability in corporate strategy and practices. Our findings show that more active involvement of management accountants depends, among other things, on their ability to broaden their competencies to include other domains of expertise and on the role of accounting education in improving their sustainability knowledge. Therefore, we call for more research on the competencies, skills, and roles that management accountants should play in order to promote the adoption and improvement of sustainability accounting and reporting.
Highlights
Over the last three decades, pressures from external stakeholders and new normative requirements for regulatory compliance as well as managers initiatives provided by managers have increased the relevance of sustainability accounting and reporting in numerous companies and in society, in general.In order to ensure that sustainability practices become deeply rooted in organizations and embedded in corporate strategy, it is necessary that management accounting and reporting integrate sustainability measures and tools that help managers include sustainability criteria in their decision-making processes and in organizational daily routines [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We describe the motivations for this research project and how we decided to approach this stream of literature
In E1, for example, Egan and Tweedie [64] use the case study method focusing on a large Australian company in order to investigate how management accountants can contribute to corporate sustainability
Summary
Over the last three decades, pressures from external stakeholders and new normative requirements for regulatory compliance as well as managers initiatives provided by managers have increased the relevance of sustainability accounting and reporting in numerous companies and in society, in general.In order to ensure that sustainability practices become deeply rooted in organizations and embedded in corporate strategy, it is necessary that management accounting and reporting integrate sustainability measures and tools that help managers include sustainability criteria in their decision-making processes and in organizational daily routines [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].
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