Sustainability reporting and management control – A systematic exploratory literature review

Abstract

While there is extensive knowledge on management control systems (MCS) and a large body of literature focusing on sustainability reporting (SR), studies investigating the interplay of SR and MCS are still at an early stage, although a broad consensus exists that for a good progress towards corporate sustainability interlinking of reporting and control is needed. What is more, organizations which are just having a sustainability report in place, but do not implement proper control mechanisms towards sustainability, run the risk that their efforts are perceived as a well-meaning reputation-building attempt at the best. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to identify and cluster relevant literature on the interplay between SR and MCS. To achieve this goal, a systematic literature review considering publications between the years 2000 and 2018 has been performed. For clustering the findings, the popular MCS package of Malmi and Brown (2008) was used. The systematic literature review is based on 53 publications that examined the linkage of SR and MCS. The papers revealed various connections in both directions – the effect of MCS on SR and the use of SR within MCS – that can be assigned to the different management control elements of the MCS package of Malmi and Brown (2008). Furthermore, the findings suggest that there is a reciprocal linkage between SR and MCS and that the existing body of literature does not go beyond an instrumental and therefore functionalistic perspective. Additionally, the literature is lacking on empirical, theory guided and critical analyses.