Assessing and Benchmarking Sustainability in Organisations

Abstract

This article proposes an integrated conceptual model for assessing and benchmarking sustainability initiatives in organisations. Recent relevant published literature in the business sustainability assessments and benchmarking related domain has been surveyed and documented. Business sustainability is being conceptualised using two approaches, namely abstractive decomposition and typology. The conceptualisations derived from both of these approaches have been integrated to construct a new conceptual model for the theorizing of business sustainability from a holistic perspective. A text visualisation of the sustainability reports of ten large-scale software development firms have been done to look at the density of sustainability concepts in practice-based documentations, such as company reports. The conceptualisations derived through both the abstractive decomposition and the typology have been validated using the secondary data aggregation done from the analysis of reports. The article concludes with a summary highlighting the key aspects of the chapter.