CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY, STRATEGY AND ACCOUNTING CONTROLS: AN EXPLORATION OF CORPORATE PRACTICES

The accounting and management control literature
demonstrates the key role of management control to
support strategy implementation. However, despite
several calls in the social and environmental
accounting research (Parker, 2000; Chung and Parker,
2008), to date, very few studies have explored how
management controls support the implementation of a
sustainability strategy in practice.
With reference to Malmi and Brown framework
(2008), this paper explores the existence of a selection
of accounting-based controls (planning, cybernetic
control as well as reward and compensation systems)
to support sustainability strategy deployment.
Concretely, based on the qualitative analysis of seven
cases, it investigates what kind of accounting-based
management controls exists in multinational
corporations to support the implementation of an
explicit sustainability strategy