A literature review on models for assessing corporate sustainability

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a literature review on models for assessing corporate sustainability. The review encompasses 68 papers that were published in indexed peer-reviewed journals from 1990 to 2019, which were available on Web of ScienceTM in May 2020. The goal of this study is to evaluate how corporate sustainability is being evaluated in different sectors. We concluded that there is still no consensus among researchers from different areas regarding what corporate sustainability means and different indicators have been used to assess it. The biggest problem is that in various cases the sustainability tripod is not considered. Our study recommends a set of relevant indicators to be adopted for assessing corporate sustainability considering a four-dimensional perspective. The recommendation is based on the number of times these indicators were applied in the reviewed models, and it can be useful for different types of organisations and/or sectors. For future work, we suggest improving this review to include other databases and consequently other relevant publications, to analyse the operators used to aggregate the uni-dimensional information, and then to propose a general four-dimensional index for corporate sustainability assessment, based on a non-compensatory aggregation operator, which can be applied to evaluate different types of companies.

KEYWORDS:

• Triple Bottom Line (TBL)
• Sustainability Evaluation
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Sustainability Indicators
• Corporate Sustainability Index

Acknowledgments

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES), Finance Code 001.

Notes on contributors

Paloma R. S. Bezerra

Paloma: Master in Administration (Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil). Member of the research groups: DeSiDeS (Development of Support Systems for Sustainable Decisions from Federal University of Campina Grande), and Knowledge Management and Sustainability from the State University of Paraíba, Brazil. Current research interests include: Organizational Studies; Entrepreneurship; and Sustainable development.

Fernando Schramm

Fernando: Associate Professor at Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil, Head of DeSiDeS (Development of Systems for Supporting Sustainable Decisions). Current research interests include: problem structuring methods; multi-criteria decision making; group decision; negotiation and conflict resolution; data science; and artificial neural networks.

Vanessa B. Schramm

Vanessa: Associate Professor at Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil, IEEE Senior Member. Head of DeSiDeS (Development of Systems for Supporting Sustainable Decisions). Current research interests include: problem structuring methods; multi-criteria decision making; group decision; negotiation and conflict resolution.