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

1. INTRODUCTION

Every year, we observe an increasing number of sustainable consumers who incorporate sustainability issues in their buying decisions. Moreover, these new class of consumers desire that besides shareholders’ gains, the value generated by organisations should have a positive impact for the environment and society. As a consequence of this new consumer behaviour, investors are looking for corporations that have been adopting sustainability practices in their processes and policies. Corporate sustainability involves applying systematic efforts in the organisation’s strategy aiming to reduce negative environmental and social impacts resulting from its processes (Hepper et al. 2017). It includes to meet the needs of its stakeholders (shareholders, employees, customers, pressure groups, communities, others) without compromising its ability to meet the needs of future generation. For this, companies need to maintain their economic, social and environmental capital base, actively contributing to sustainability in the political domain (Dyllick and Hockerts 2002).

Models for evaluating corporate sustainability have become necessary. In the last years, different non-profit organisations worldwide have been applied efforts to evaluate sustainability of companies in different segments and regions. One of the most important initiative is the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (Garcia et al. 2016) that is produced by an independent international organisation, aiming to create a global common language for organisations to report their impacts. Other important initiative is the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) that aims to evaluate various publicly traded companies. A similar model named Corporate Sustainability Index was developed to evaluate companies listed in the São Paulo Stock Exchange (BM&FBOVESPA). In Brazil, there are also the indicators proposed by Ethos Institute, which is a civil society organisation, whose goal is to support private companies to manage their businesses adopting sustainability principles.

Organizations can measure corporate sustainability using models proposed by specialised agencies (GRI, DJSI, etc.) or they can develop their own models (Antolín-López, Delgado-Ceballos, and Montiel 2016). As a consequence, many models for assessing corporate sustainability have been proposed in the specialised literature (scientific papers and books). Most of them are based on the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) concept. The TBL is a business concept, proposed by Elkington (1999) that establishes that business performance should be founded on three pillars: economic (organisation’s financial success and resilience), environmental (environmental health), and social (social well-being). This concept expands the knowledge of company’s stakeholders, showing them, beyond traditional and financial aspects, the impact of the business in the world around it (Arowoshegbe and Emmanuel 2016). Some examples of models that consider the TBL concept are: Kubule and Blumberga (2019); Liern and Pérez-Gladish (2018); Vivas et al. (2019); Wang and Lin (2007). However, there are models in which the meaning of sustainability is wider, while in others is more restrict, in some cases considering only one perspective. Antolín-López, Delgado-Ceballos, and Montiel (2016) pointed out that studies are necessary to investigate which aspects are relevant to assess and to disclose impacts of corporate sustainability activities.

Feil, de Quevedo, and Schreiber (2015) affirm that models for assessing corporate sustainability have aroused notable interest from academics and business managers. The investigation of these models contributes to improve the quality of indicators, aiming to provide more appropriate answers to society’s desires (Silva, Freire, and Silva 2014). Morioka et al. (2018) add that there is a demand for studies on the development, implementation and improvement of tools that integrate the logic of sustainability and business management. Some researches aim to analyse and compare these models: A. Feil et al. (2019); Feil and Schreiber (2017); Morioka et al. (2018); Silva, Freire, and Silva (2014).

We observe that the concept sustainability can have different meanings according to the context in which it is being used; in this sense, we believe that, according to the semantic value that is being considered, a same company can have different level of performance in terms of corporate sustainability. Consequently, a sustainability index might not reflect what actually happens in practice; and, in some cases, the misinformation can be used to mislead society and investors. We need to understand what is behind a corporate sustainability index and how reliable this information seems to be. In this sense, the goal of this paper is to perform a literature review on models for assessing corporate sustainability that were published in peer-reviewed indexed journals in the last two decades, aiming to identify dimensions and main indicators used for assessing corporate sustainability, the sources of information used for evaluation of companies, and the sectors for which this type of evaluation have been applied. The paper is organised into four sections: Section 2 presents the methodological procedures; Section 3 shows the analysis of the papers; Section 4 presents the discussion of the results; and Section 5 presents the conclusions.

2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This paper presents a literature review on models for assessing corporate sustainability. The review encompasses 68 articles that were published in peer-reviewed journals between 2002 and 2019. The review follows the four-step iterative process described in Seuring and Müller (2008): (i) material collection, which includes the definition and delimitation of the materials to be analysed; (ii) descriptive analysis, which presents the distribution of papers over the years, journals with the highest number of publications, and main authors on this topic; (iii) category selection, in which we identified the structural dimensions and analytical categories to evaluate the papers; and (iv) material analysis based on the proposed evaluation framework. Figure 1 shows the review process.

Figure 1. The flowchart of the review process

2.1. Material Collection

The material collection starts with the definition of keywords and other search parameters (languages, period, type of document, etc.). Creswell and Creswell (2017) recommend starting the search on peer-reviewed journals available in computerised databases. We used the Web of ScienceTM Core Collection because it is the world’s leading scientific research and analytical information platform (Li, Rollins, and Yan Li, et al., 2018); it offers multidisciplinary services and has a common navigation environment, data structure and search language (Birkle et al. 2020). The review was performed in May 2020 using the Web of Science^TM Core Collection database. Table 1 shows the parameters used in the search.

Table 1. Parameters of the search in the Web of Science™

Parameter	Input
Keywords	TS = (‘sustainab*’ OR ‘sustainab* performanc*’ OR ‘sustainab* ind*’ OR ‘sustainab* dimensio*’) AND TS = (‘business*’ OR ‘compan*’ OR ‘organization*’ OR ‘industr*’ OR ‘supply chain*’) AND TS = (‘triple bottom line’ OR ‘TBL’ OR ‘social dimension*’ OR ‘economic dimension*’ OR ‘environmental dimension*’).
Indexes	Science Citation Index – SCI, Science Citation Index Expanded – SCIE, Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).
Document Type	‘All document types’.
Timespan	1990–2019
Language	English and Portuguese

The search returned 1,239 papers that were submitted to a preliminary analysis, by reading the title, keywords, and abstract. After that, 844 papers were removed resulting in 395 articles that were read in full. Then, we established a set of criteria for inclusion or exclusion of papers: they should present a new model for assessing corporate sustainability or apply an existing model; assessing corporate sustainability means measuring the performance of organisations and/or the performance of sustainable production practices or processes. Three hundred and twenty-seven papers that did not meet the set of criteria were removed from the base, resulting in 68 papers.

2.2. Category selection

This step includes the definition of structural dimensions and analytical categories used to evaluate the papers. Structural dimensions are the main topics of analysis and they are composed by analytical categories Seuring and Müller (2008).

For supporting this step, we used the software NVivo. As we read the papers papers, dimensions and their respective analytical categories were identified. Then, NVivo was used to encode and organise these categories into a hierarchy structure. For each encoded fragment of text, NVivo creates a nod (or a hierarchy of nodes) that is a structure to store information gathered from the papers. The meaning of the nodes depends on the methodological approach used (Lage 2010). In our study, we used the content analysis approach and the hierarchy of nodes represents categories of information, that is, the dimensions (1st level) and their respective categories (2nd level). This tree node structure is the framework used to analyse the papers (Table 2). This framework allows us to identify the dimensions and main indicators used in the models for assessing sustainability, the sources used for assessing the indicators, the sectors for which the indicators are being proposed/applied. As the papers we read, NVivo addressed each segment of the text to the proper category in the framework.

Table 2. Category analysis

Structural Dimensions	Analytical categories	Description
Sustainability dimensions	Economic	It involves the company’s economic performance and the organisation’s contribution to the economy. Includes profit, cost, investment, etc.
	Social	It refers to beneficial and fair actions taken for employees and the community, such as human rights, diversity, health and safety, etc.
	Environmental	It deals with the efficient use of environmental resources. Includes environmental management system, emission control, water, etc.
	Governance	It deals with the relationship between stakeholders and the structure that directs and controls organisations. It includes ethics and anti-corruption, policy, strategy, etc.
	Social + Environmental	It deals with Social and Environmental dimensions simultaneously.
	TBL	It deals with Economic, Social and Environmental dimensions simultaneously.
	Economic + Social + Governance	It deals with Economic, Social and Governance dimensions simultaneously.
	Social + Environmental + Governance	It deals with Social, Environmental and Governance dimensions simultaneously.
	TBL + Governance	It deals with Economic, Social, Environmental, and Governance dimensions simultaneously.
Input sources	Specialised literature	Specialised literature on the topic (scientific papers, books, and others).
	Corporate sustainability reports	Reports from companies and rating agencies and corporate sustainability assessment.
	Specialists’ evaluation	Specialists’ evaluation performed through interviews, workshop, questionnaire, etc.
	Specialised literature + Corporate sustainability reports	Integration of Specialised literature and international sustainability reports.
	Specialised Literature + Specialists’ evaluation	Integration of Specialised literature and Specialists’ evaluation.
	Corporate sustainability reports + Specialists’ evaluation	Integration of Corporate sustainability reports and Specialists’ evaluation.
	Corporate sustainability reports + Specialised literature + International Standards	Integration of Corporate sustainability reports, Specialised literature, and International standards such as ISO – International Organization for Standardisation.
Sectors/Areas	Energy Sector	Includes substances such as fuels, oil products and electricity in general.
	Transport and Logistics	It deals with the transport of people and goods. Includes airlines, airfreight and logistics, transportation infrastructure, etc.
	Materials Sector	It covers production inputs, materials for infrastructure, steel and other goods. Includes mining, metals, forest products, chemicals, etc.
	Commercial and Professional Services	Includes immaterial goods, such as commercial supplies and other diversified support services.
	Automotive Industry	It consists of the auto parts chain and the light and heavy vehicle segment (Includes Automotive Components and Car Manufacturers).
	Discretionary Consumer Goods	It includes consumption sensitive to economic cycles, such as electronics, clothing, accessories, furniture, etc.
	Consumer Goods	It includes non-durable goods, which need to be replaced frequently, such as food, drinks, tobacco, etc.
	Banking and Financial Services	It involves diversified financial services (capital markets, investment bank and brokerage, etc.)
	Healthcare	Includes health equipment and services provided to individuals, for example, Medical Assistance, Health Technology, Biotechnology, etc.
	Capital Goods	These are necessary goods for the production of other goods and facilities, such as machinery and equipment, construction and engineering, etc.
	Various	The model was proposed/applied to more than one of the above sectors.
Sustainability indicators	Economic	Indicators related to the Economic dimension.
	Social	Indicators related to the Social dimension.
	Environmental	Indicators related to the Environmental dimension.
	Governance	Indicators related to the Governance dimension include operational aspects of organisations’ horizontal and vertical departments, the relationship between stakeholders and the company’s position in the market.
	Others	Indicators that are not part of the Triple Bottom Line concept (Governance, institutional, internal processes, etc.).

3. ANALYSIS

The goal of the analysis is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the research, and also to identify research gaps that deserve more attention (Leonidou et al. 2020). In the descriptive analysis step, we extract characteristics of interest from each study: distribution of papers over the years, the main journals in which they were published and the more productive authors. In the qualitative analysis, we tried to identify relationships among the papers.

3.1. Distribution of the papers per year, journals and authors

Although our review encompasses the period 1990–2019, the first paper was published in 2002 and it proposes a model for measuring the progress of institutions based on Agenda 21 (Spangenberg 2002). Figure 2 presents the evolution of the papers over the years, from 2002 to 2019.

Figure 2. Distribution of the papers per year

In 2015, the world confirmed its commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which is an action programmefor people, the planet and prosperity with the aim of improving the quality of life (Hristov and Chirico 2019). This can explain the increasing in the number of publications in the last 5 years: ~70% of the publications are concentrated between 2015 and 2019 (average of 9,6 articles per year). The papers were distributed into 34 different journals. Only 3 journals have more than 2 publications on this topic: Journal of Cleaner Production (12 papers, ~18%), the Sustainability Journal (8 papers, ~12%), and the Management of Environmental Quality (3 papers, ~4%). Figure 3 presents the journals with the highest volume of publications.

Figure 3. Distribution of the papers per journals

In 2015, the world confirmed its commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which is an action programme for people, the planet and prosperity with the aim of improving the quality of life (Hristov and Chirico 2019). This can explain the increasing number of publications in the last 5 years – ~70% of the publications are concentrated between 2015 and 2019 (average of 9,6 articles per year).

The papers were distributed into 34 different journals. Only 3 journals have more than 2 publications on this topic (Figure 3): Journal of Cleaner Production (12 papers, ~18%), the Sustainability Journal (8 papers, ~12%), and the Management of Environmental Quality (3 papers, ~4%).

The sample contains 205 different authors: 95% (194 authors) published only one paper; 3% (7 authors) published two papers; 2% (4 authors) published more than three. Based on the number of publications, the main authors are as follows: Goran Svensson from Norway; Carmen Padin from Spain; Beverly Wagner from Scotland; and Lu Wang from Beijing/China, who investigates metal-organic structures. Goran Svensson’s main interest topics are corporate sustainability, ethics, marketing, supply chain, and service management. In his six papers, which are produced in collaboration with other authors, including Carmen Padin and Beverly Wagner, the authors explore sustainable business practices based on the TBL concept (Dos Santos, Svensson, and Padin (2013); Høgevold et al. (2015); Høgevold et al. (2019); Laurell et al. (2019); Svensson et al. (2016); Svensson and Wagner (2015). Lu Wang’s research area is metal-organic structures, but he also has research on models for assessing corporate sustainability considering the TBL concept (Wang, Wang, and Dai (2018); Wang and Lin (2007); Wang et al. (2018).

3.2. Sustainability dimensions

In 66% of the cases (45 papers), corporate sustainability is evaluated considering the TBL concepts, that is, economic, environmental, and social dimensions simultaneously. Madan Shankar, Kannan, and Udhaya Kumar (2017) considered the TBL, but the social dimension was modelled adopting a perspective that is focused on healthy and safety of individuals. Instead of using the term social, they named the third dimension as employee safety, encompassing issues such as training and education programmes, use of personal protective equipment, etc. Hussain, Alameeri, and Ajmal (2017) extend the focus on healthy and safety to corporate’s customers.

In addition to TBL, some studies consider an extra dimension that encompasses issues on ethics, strategies, business policies, relationship with stakeholders: Aras et al. (2017); Schrippe and Ribeiro (2019); Wang, Wang, and Dai (2018). This fourth dimension has been called by its authors governance, corporate governance, corporate sustainability. K. E., V. S., and Gurumurthy (2018) added a dimension called business, for dealing with conflict management and organisation image. And Loor Alcívar et al. (2020) added a fourth dimension named corporate identity, which focuses on the company’s vision and mission. Despite the different nomenclature the dimensions also evaluate one or more aspects of governance, which encompasses every sphere of management. Governance was also considered in the study by Bonsón and Bednárová (2015) and Muñoz-Torres et al. (2019). However, in the former, the environmental dimension was suppressed, and only economic and social aspects were considered in combination with governance issues. While in the second study, the authors suppressed the economic dimension, remaining environmental, social and governance dimensions.

Some studies considered only environmental and social dimensions simultaneously: Amor-Esteban, Galindo-Villardón, and García-Sánchez (2019); Cowper-Smith and de Grosbois (2011); Esteban, Villardón, and Sánchez (2017); Nikolaou, Tsalis, and Evangelinos (2019). Others studies evaluated sustainability considering a single perspective: Regarding the environmental dimensions, we identified the following studies: Cubilla-Montilla et al. (2020); Nallusamy et al. (2015); Silva, Freire, and Silva (2014). As for social dimension, we identified the following studies: Ajmal et al. (2018); Hutchins et al. (2019); Paredes-Gazquez, Rodriguez-Fernandez, and de La Cuesta-gonzalez (2016). Staniškienė and Stankevičiūtė (2018) evaluated the social dimension over a perspective of relationship with employees, including employee participation, cooperation, equal opportunities, employee development, health and safety, and partnership. Spangenberg (2002) evaluated corporate sustainability considering a governance perspective, based on the idea that organisations have a structure guided by implicit and explicit internal rules. Deng et al. (2018) and Lu et al. (2016) proposed an evaluation of corporate sustainability considering the perspective focused on governance aspects (learning and growth, internal processes, customers and finance) without care about what happens beyond its boundaries; the indicators focus on maintaining and increasing economic performance; some of the criteria are as follows: employee productivity, increasing management efficiency, corporate image, etc.

Roca and Searcy (2012) and Rowley, Geschke, and Lenzen (2015) did not present the dimensions that they use for evaluation of corporate sustainability.

3.2.1. Input sources

In 43% of the cases (29 papers), sustainability indicators adopted in these studies were obtained from the specialised literature. In 29% (20 papers), authors used indicators obtained from corporate sustainability reports published by companies and specialised agencies, such as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), Corporate Sustainability Index from BM&FBOVESPA, etc. Most of them (~74%) adopted GRI indicators. The following studies adopted exclusively GRI indicators: Ahmad, Wong, and Rajoo (2019); Ajmal et al. (2018); Baumgartner and Ebner (2010); Cubilla-Montilla et al. (2020); de Campos and Simon (2019); Garcia et al. (2016); Gómez-Navarro et al. (2018); Infante et al. (2013); Lenort et al. (2017); Rai (2015); Silva, Freire, and Silva (2014). Beyond GRI, Cowper-Smith and de Grosbois (2011) adopted indicators provided by the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Tourism Organization, which is an agency associated with the United Nations that seeks to promote sustainable tourism. Amoako, Lord, and Dixon (2017) adopted GRI and reports from the United Nations Division of Sustainable Development (UNDSD). Finally, Roca and Searcy (2012) adopted GRI and sustainability reports from Canadian companies. Alternatively to the GRI, Bonsón and Bednárová (2015) adopted a set of non-financial indicators provided by AECA (acronym in Spanish to Asociación Española de Contabilidad y Administración de Empresas) for evaluation of Eurozone’s companies. The AECA’s non-financial (NI) indicators aim to reduce the lack of balance between the indicators evidenced by other structures, such as the GRI, which focuses on governance guidelines. Still in the European ambit, Escamilla-Solano (2019) adopted reports from different companies and indicators provides by the European Commission, which is a European institution for promoting economic, political, and social cooperation and integration.

Indicators provided by two Brazilian organisations were also applied: Schrippe and Ribeiro (2019) adopted the Corporate Sustainability Index proposed by the São Paulo Stock Exchange (BM&FBOVESPA); and Sarango-Lalangui, Álvarez-García, and Del Río-rama (2018) adopted Indicators of the Ethos Institute. Ocampo, Clark, and Promentilla (2016) were based on the Sustainable Manufacturing Indicator Repository (SMIR) which provides different databases and indicators categorised by topics to measure their sustainability performance. Dos Dos Santos, Svensson, and Padin (2013) evaluated the sustainability of a retail chain and adopted indicators collected from annual reports produced by the company itself. In some cases (9% of the papers), authors used studies published in the specialised literature combined with corporate sustainability reports: GRI, United Nations Environment Program Financial Initiative (UNEP-FI), and Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) (Aras et al. 2017); and GRI (Hourneaux, Gabriel, and Gallardo-Vázquez 2018; Hubbard 2009; Reis, Jacomossi, and Casagrande 2015; Wang et al. 2015).

In 10% of the cases (7 papers), sustainability indicators were proposed based on judgement of specialists (academics, managers and other employees qualified and/or experienced in a particular area of knowledge) collected through interviews, workshop, questionnaire, etc.: Buys et al. (2014); Da Silva Batista and de Francisco (2018); Hutchins et al. (2019); Kolk, Hong, and van Dolen (2008); Laurell et al. (2019); Nara et al. (2019); Staniškienė and Stankevičiūtė (2018). Some studies (4% of the cases) adopted judgement of specialists combined with corporate sustainability reports (Muñoz-Torres et al. 2019; Rowley, Geschke, and Lenzen 2015; Wang and Lin 2007). Other studies (3%) adopted judgement of specialists combined with specialised literature sources (Deng et al. 2018; Lucato, Da Silva Santos, and Tadeu Pacchini 2017). Antolín-López, Delgado-Ceballos, and Montiel (2016) and Oliveira, Zanella, and Camanho (2019) were based on specialised literature, corporate sustainability reports (GRI, DJSI, etc.), and international standards (ISO 26000), which deals with social responsibility and aims to help organisations to incorporate social and environmental practices.

3.2.2. Sustainability indicators

Five hundred and eighty-three indicators were identified and grouped into four analytical categories: economic, social, environmental, and other. Secondly, we combined indicators that evaluate the same aspect, even when they have different nomenclatures. Then, we selected relevant aspects and provided a description for them; each description encompasses all indicators that were aggregated in it. The criterion used to determine the relevance of aspects is the number of times they were applied in the reviewed papers.

The economic dimension of TBL is focused on the economic value generated by the company and on the organisation’s contribution to the economy (Elkington 1999). This dimension comprises 93 sub-indicators and the most relevant isare as follows: Profit, Cost, Revenue, Expense, Economy, Investment, and other economic values. Table 3 shows these criteria.

Table 3. Indicators based on the economic dimension of the Triple Bottom Line

Indicator	Description
Profit	It refers to the financial gains achieved by the company. Includes the value created per employee, per share, etc.
Cost	It gathers data and information on the value directed to the production of goods and services. It includes the cost per unit produced, the cost of recycling, etc.
Revenue	It deals with the amount received resulting from the sale of products and services, such as total service revenue., Gross revenue amount, etc.
Expense	Amount that is not intended for the production of goods and services, such as tax expense, customer expense, etc.
Economy	Evaluates the company’s contribution to the economy of regions, such as job and income creation.
Investment	Corresponds to the resources applied in order to bring benefits to the company/society, such as investment in research activities, infrastructure, etc.
Other economic indicators	It includes other data on the company’s equity and the performance of the company’s financial capital, such as cash flow, EBITDA margin, total assets, etc.

The social dimension of TBL includes conducting beneficial and fair practices for employees, human capital and the community (Elkington 1999). This dimension grouped 174 sub-indicators and the most relevants are as follows: Employees, Community, Health and safety, Human capital, Human rights, and Diversity and social equity. Table 4 shows these criteria.

Table 4. Indicators based on the social dimension of the Triple Bottom Line

Indicator	Description
Employees	They explore the company’s relationship with its employees. It includes employee participation, performance evaluation, guarantee of labour rights, etc.
Community	It studies the company’s relationship with the local community. It includes donations, sponsorships, investments and other actions that positively impact society.
Health and safety	It covers data collection and actions taken by the company to ensure the health and safety of employees and the community, such as health and safety systems, injury rates, occupational diseases, etc.
Human capital	It includes opportunities that the company offers for the development of employees, such as training, qualifications, access to resources, etc.
Human rights	It deals with the company’s respect for human rights, such as the number of agreements that incorporate human rights issues, guaranteeing the rights of minority professionals, clients, etc.
Diversity and social equity	It includes offering equal opportunities for employee development and respect for diversity and social equity.

The environmental dimension of TBL involves efficient use of administrative resources not to compromise future generations (Elkington 1999). This category gathered 113 sub-indicators and the most relevant are as follows: Biodiversity, Environmental management system, Emissions, Water, Energy, and Waste. Table 5 shows these criteria.

Table 5. Indicators based on the environmental dimension of the Triple Bottom Line

Indicator	Description
Biodiversity	Current planning and actions for managing impacts generated on biodiversity, such as assessing the quality of natural habitat, planting trees, etc.
Environmental management system	It includes environmental practices and tools used by the company to contribute to sustainable development, such as Eco-innovation, Eco-efficiency, Sustainability Forum, etc.
Emissions	It involves the registration of total emissions and the prevention and control initiatives carried out by the company. It includes the direct or indirect amount of emissions, air quality, etc.
Water	Water use and efficiency practices considered by the company. It includes direct and indirect water consumption, the proportion of renewable water used, etc.
Energy	Initiatives for energy use and efficiency carried out by the company. It includes investment in energy projects, consumption of renewable energy, consumption of non-renewable energy, etc.
Waste	It studies practices adopted by the company to reduce, reuse, recycle and ensure the correct environmental destination for waste. Includes survey of the amount of waste generated, amount recycled, reverse logistics, etc.

The governance dimension encompasses every sphere of management, from company’s objectives, to action plans and internal controls, performance measurement, corporate disclosure, and relationship with its various stakeholders (shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, financiers, the government, and the community). This group comprises 203 sub-indicators and the most relevant are: Governance, Internal process, Customer, Compliance with legislation, Ethics and anti-corruption, Communication, Policy, Strategy, Supply chain, Company and Product. Table 6 shows these criteria.

Table 6. Governance dimension indicators

Indicator	Description
Governance	It understands the management practices adopted by the company, it mainly considers the management of the relationship with the interested parties.
Internal process	It includes the evaluation of the results of the production processes of goods and services, also considering the management of materials and other resources used in the activities of the companies, example: Total production, investments in new technologies and updating of infrastructure, etc.
Customer/consumer	Relationship management with customers and consumers. Includes customer view, customer retention rate, customer satisfaction survey, etc.
Compliance with legislation	It deals with the company’s behaviour in relation to social laws and regulations, including product rules, regulatory notices.
Ethics and anti-corruption	It includes an ethical posture in business, the prevention and combating of opportunistic attitudes, such as code of ethics, policy and corporate anti-corruption standard, etc.
Communication	It involves transparent communication with stakeholders, including reports, number of complaints, sustainability certificates, etc.
Policy	It involves the creation of corporate policies and the defence of society’s interests, collaborating with the development of public policies. Includes anti-bribery policies, contributions to political parties, etc.
Strategy	It deals with the company’s position in the market, such as competitiveness, systemic vision, objectives and goals, corporate identity, etc.
Supply chain	It involves resources and actions taken from the acquisition of raw materials to sending products or services to customers/consumers. Includes supplier assessment, storage and logistics, etc.
Company	They consider traditional topics of general administration and for the conduct of associations. It includes organisational culture, organisational structure, marketing practices, etc.
Product	It includes traditional aspects considered in product development and the incorporation of environmental criteria, such as advanced product design, quality and durability, etc.

3.2.3. Sector

In 46% of cases (31 papers), the studies were intended to only one sector: Materials Sector (Ahmad, Wong, and Rajoo 2019; Amoako, Lord, and Dixon 2017; Braccini and Margherita 2018; Lenort et al. 2017; Ocampo, Clark, and Promentilla 2016; Oliveira, Zanella, and Camanho 2019); Energy Sector (Garcia et al. 2016; Infante et al. 2013; Paredes-Gazquez, Rodriguez-Fernandez, and de La Cuesta-gonzalez 2016); Energy Sector (Cowper-Smith and de Grosbois 2011; Karaman and Akman 2018; Thabrew et al. 2018); Transport and Logistics (Hilsdorf, de Mattos, and de Campos Maciel 2017; Hussain, Alameeri, and Ajmal 2017; Nallusamy et al. 2015; Wang et al. 2015); Discretionary Consumer Goods (Charmondusit, Phatarachaisakul, and Prasertpong 2014; Feil, de Quevedo, and Schreiber 2015; Huang and Badurdeen 2017; Lu et al. 2016; Madan Shankar, Kannan, and Udhaya Kumar 2017); Consumer Goods (Buys et al. 2014; Nara et al. 2019); Banking and Financial Services (Aras et al. 2017; Escamilla-Solano 2019; Rai 2015); Commercial and Professional Services (Deng et al. 2018; Gómez-Navarro et al. 2018; Muñoz-Torres et al. 2019; Wang, Wang, and Dai 2018; Zahid and Ghazali 2015). Figure 4 shows the distribution of studies in this group based on the sectors evaluated.

Figure 4. Distribution of studies based on the sectors evaluated

Other studies (16% or 11 papers) were concerned with evaluation of sustainability of companies from different sectors: Energy Sector and Materials Sector (Silva, Freire, and Silva 2014); Banking and Financial Services, Healthcare, Energy Sector, etc. (Amor-Esteban, Galindo-Villardón, and García-Sánchez 2019); Materials Sector and Discretionary Consumer Goods (Froehlich and Bitencourt 2016); Banking and Financial Services, Energy Sector, Materials sector, etc. (Reis, Jacomossi, and Casagrande 2015); Healthcare, Consumer Goods, Materials Sector, among others (Rowley, Geschke, and Lenzen 2015); Commercial and Professional Services and Consumer Goods (Oginni and Omojowo 2016); Automotive Industry, Banking and Financial Services, Consumer Goods, Healthcare, Materials Sector, Commercial and Professional Services, etc. (Bonsón and Bednárová 2015); Materials Sector, Energy Sector, Banking and Financial Services, Capital Goods, etc. (Roca and Searcy 2012); Energy Sector, Transport and Logistics, etc. (Schrippe and Ribeiro 2019); Discretionary Consumer Good, Consumer Goods, Commercial and Professional Services, etc. (Svensson and Wagner 2015); Commercial and Professional Services, Capital Goods, etc. (Svensson et al. 2016).

The rest of the studies, 38% of the sample (26 papers) do not show the sector.

3.2.4. Category analysis

Table 7 presents a summary of the category analysis.

Table 7. Summary of the category analysis

ID	Dimensions	Source of indicators	Sector	Reference
1	Governance	Corporate sustainability reports + Specialists’ evaluation	Commercial and Professional Services	Muñoz-Torres et al. (2019)
2	Environmental	Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Cubilla-Montilla et al. (2020)
3	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports + Specialised literature + International Standards	N/A	Antolín-López, Delgado-Ceballos, and Montiel (2016)
4	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Commercial and Professional Services	Gómez-Navarro et al. (2018)
5	TBL + Governance	Specialised literature	N/A	Loor Alcívar et al. (2020)
6	TBL + Governance	Specialised literature + Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Aras et al. (2017)
7	TBL	Specialised literature	N/A	Høgevold et al. (2019)
8	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Banking and Financial Services	Escamilla-Solano (2019)
9	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Banking and Financial Services	Rai (2015)
10	Environmental	Corporate sustainability reports	Various	Silva, Freire, and Silva (2014)
11	TBL	Specialised literature	Materials Sector	Ahmad, Wong, and Rajoo (2019)
12	Social	Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Ajmal et al. (2018)
13	TBL	Specialised literature	N/A	de Campos and Simon (2019)
14	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Materials Sector	Amoako, Lord, and Dixon (2017)
15	Social + Environmental	Specialised literature	Various	Amor-Esteban, Galindo-Villardón, and García-Sánchez (2019)
16	TBL + Governance	Specialised literature	N/A	K. E., V. S., and Gurumurthy (2018)
17	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Baumgartner and Ebner (2010)
18	Governance	Corporate sustainability reports	Various	Bonsón and Bednárová (2015)
19	TBL	Specialised literature	Materials Sector	Braccini and Margherita (2018)
20	TBL	Specialists’ evaluation	Consumer Goods	Buys et al. (2014)
21	Governance	Specialised Literature + Specialists’ evaluation	Banking and Financial Services	Deng et al. (2018)
22	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Dos Santos, Svensson, and Padin (2013)
23	TBL	Specialised literature	Discretionary Consumer Goods	Charmondusit, Phatarachaisakul, and Prasertpong (2014)
24	Social + Environmental	Corporate sustainability reports	Transport and Logistics	Cowper-Smith and de Grosbois (2011)
25	Social +Environmental	Specialised literature	N/A	Esteban, Villardón, and Sánchez (2017)
26	TBL	Specialised literature	Discretionary Consumer Goods	Feil, de Quevedo, and Schreiber (2015)
27	TBL	Specialised literature	Various	Froehlich and Bitencourt (2016)
28	TBL	Specialised literature	Automotive Industry	Hilsdorf, de Mattos, and de Campos Maciel (2017)
29	TBL	Specialised literature	N/A	Høgevold et al. (2015)
30	TBL	Specialised literature + Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Hourneaux, Gabriel, and Gallardo-Vázquez (2018)
31	TBL	Specialised literature	N/A	Hristov and Chirico (2019)
32	TBL	Specialised literature + Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Hubbard (2009)
33	Social	Specialists’ evaluation	N/A	Hutchins et al. (2019)
34	TBL	Specialists’ evaluation	N/A	Kolk, Hong, and van Dolen (2008)
35	TBL	Specialised literature	Discretionary Consumer Goods	Madan Shankar, Kannan, and Udhaya Kumar (2017)
36	TBL	Specialists’ evaluation	N/A	Laurell et al. (2019)
37	TBL	Specialised Literature + Specialists’ evaluation	N/A	Lucato, Da Silva Santos, and Tadeu Pacchini (2017)
38	Environmental	Specialised literature	Automotive Industry	Nallusamy et al. (2015)
39	TBL	Specialists’ evaluation	N/A	Da Silva Batista and de Francisco (2018)
40	Social + Environmental	Specialised literature	N/A	Nikolaou, Tsalis, and Evangelinos (2019)
41	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Discretionary Consumer Goods	Ocampo, Clark, and Promentilla (2016)
42	TBL	Specialised literature	Various	Oginni and Omojowo (2016)
43	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports + Specialised literature + International Standards	Materials sector	Oliveira, Zanella, and Camanho (2019)
44	Social	Specialised literature	Energy Sector	Paredes-Gazquez, Rodriguez-Fernandez, and de La Cuesta-gonzalez (2016)
45	N/A	Corporate sustainability reports	Various	Roca and Searcy (2012)
46	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	N/A	Sarango-Lalangui, Álvarez-García, and Del Río-rama (2018)
47	TBL + Governance	Corporate sustainability reports	Various	Schrippe and Ribeiro (2019)
48	Governance	Specialised literature	N/A	Spangenberg (2002)
49	Social	Specialists’ evaluation	N/A	Staniškienė and Stankevičiūtė (2018)
50	TBL	Specialised literature	N/A	Feil et al. (2019)
51	TBL	Specialised literature	Discretionary Consumer Goods	Huang and Badurdeen (2017)
52	TBL	Specialised literature	Various	Svensson and Wagner (2015)
53	TBL	Specialised literature	Commercial and professional services, Capital goods, etc.	Svensson et al. (2016)
54	TBL	Specialised literature	Transport and Logistics	Thabrew et al. (2018)
55	TBL	Specialised literature + Corporate sustainability reports	Automotive Industry	Wang et al. (2015)
56	TBL + Governance	Specialised literature	Commercial and Professional Services	Wang, Wang, and Dai (2018)
57	TBL	Specialised literature	Commercial and Professional Services	Zahid and Ghazali (2015)
58	TBL	Specialised literature + Corporate sustainability reports	Various	Reis, Jacomossi, and Casagrande (2015)
59	TBL	Specialised literature	Automotive Industry	Hussain, Alameeri, and Ajmal (2017)
60	TBL	Specialists’ evaluation	Consumer Goods	Nara et al. (2019)
61	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Energy Sector	Infante et al. (2013)
62	TBL	Specialised literature	Transport and Logistics	Karaman and Akman (2018)
63	Governance	Specialised literature	Discretionary Consumer Good	Lu et al. (2016)
64	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports + Specialists’ evaluation	N/A	Wang and Lin (2007)
65	N/A	Corporate sustainability reports + Specialists’ evaluation	Various	Rowley, Geschke, and Lenzen (2015)
66	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Materials Sector	Lenort et al. (2017)
67	TBL	Specialised literature	N/A	Wang, Wang, and Dai (2018)
68	TBL	Corporate sustainability reports	Energy Sector	Garcia et al. (2016)

4. DISCUSSION

Since 2015, Assessing corporate sustainability has gained increasing attention from academics. We believe that this is a consequence of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that was launched in 2015: around 70% of publications concentrated in the last 5 years. These papers are widely distributed in 34 peer review journals that encompasses issues on Operations Research Management Science, Business Economics, Engineering, Environmental Science Ecology, Scientific Technology, Development Studies, Biodiversity Conservation, and other topics, indicating that the topic is being addressed over different perspectives.

Nonetheless, this research topic is still incipient and as well as the concept corporate sustainability. In the reviewed papers, we observed that the semantic meaning of corporate sustainability were constructed in different ways; in most of cases, this concept is founded on the tripod economic-social-environmental. However, in almost 10% of cases, sustainability concept does not consider the sustainability tripod, and in some cases only one dimension was considered, which means the meaning of sustainability is completely misunderstood. Moreover, various studies define corporate sustainability considering aspects of governance, adopting a perspective that observes issues like company’s goals, strategies and action plans, internal controls, ethics, performance measurement, supply chain, relationship with stakeholders, etc. We believe this four-dimensional perspective (economic, social, environmental, and governance) is essential to provide a proper meaning to corporate sustainability.

Different types of information are being used to construct the perspective of each dimension: we identified 583 indicators. Depending on indicators that were adopted to assess the level of corporate sustainability, a same company can have different performance indexes, and both might not reflect what actually happens in practice. it is necessary to calibrate instruments used to assess corporate sustainability, establishing which indicators are relevant to evaluates aspects of sustainability in each dimension, considering also the particularities of sector/segment organisations are inserted to. Moreover, the quality of information used to assess these indicators it is very important to ensure the accuracy of these instruments. Aiming to contribute with this calibration, we suggest a set of indicators that can be used to assess sustainability according to each dimension; the criteria used for selected the indicators was number of times they were applied in the reviewed papers.

Other aspect that important, is the way in which the indicators are aggregated to construct the four-dimensional information that will represent the index of corporate sustainability. It is important to avoid the effect of compensation that some aggregation operators provoke; that is, we should avoid that a poor performance in a given dimension (for example, environmental) can be compensated by for a very good performance in other (for example, economic). This type of trade-off is not acceptable when we are looking for sustainable development. This is a critical issue because most of models for assessing sustainability are based on the additive model, which is a compensatory operator. We encourage for the used of non-compensatory aggregation operators, such as the outranking multi-criteria methods, to ensure a strong concept of sustainability.

Finally, we observed that some studies lacks from foundation on the specialist literature on sustainability. The Bellagio Principles highlight the need to use models with targeted objectives, to adopt a holistic view, to use a simple structure capable of adapting to contingencies, to enable clear and comprehensive communication to support the decision-making of actors – key, etc. (Malheiros, Coutinho, and Philippi Júnior 2012). However, in various of the reviewed models, the instruments/metrics for evaluation of indicators are not provided.

5. CONCLUSIONS

This paper presents a literature review on models for assessing corporate sustainability. We searched for papers that were published in indexed peer-reviewed journals from 1990 to 2019, which were available on Web of Science^TM Core Collection database in May 2020. A total of 68 papers were reviewed in depth according to a set of analytical categories that were organised into four structural dimensions: sustainability dimensions, input sources, sector/areas, sustainability indicators. The first paper was published in 2002, but around 70% of studies were published from 2015 onward, possibly influenced by the United Nations General Assembly that occurred in 2015 and established the 2030 Agenda. The publication are spread across 34 journals that publishes contributions on different areas, indicating that corporate sustainability assesses have been addressed in the literature by academics from different research areas. However, 95% of these authors has only one publication, indicating that the issue is still in a beginning phase.

Indeed, in the qualitative analysis, we observed that there is still no consensus among these researchers regarding what corporate sustainability means. Different indicators have been applied to construct the corporate sustainability concept. These indicators were organised into four dimensions: economic, social, environmental, and governance, which is a dimension that encompasses aspects of management. Most of the models are based on the sustainability tripod, but in various case the Triple Bottom Line was not considered and in some critical case only one dimension was considered to evaluate sustainability. One consequence of this is that a corporate sustainability index associated with a given organisation might not reflect what this organisation does in practice.

It is not possible to assess sustainability without concern with economic, social and environmental aspects, simultaneously. But in case of corporate sustainability the Triple Bottom Line is not enough and aspects of governance should be observers, making the corporate sustainability a four-dimensional concept. 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.

Besides the information used to construct the corporate sustainability concept, other critical aspect is the way in which this information is aggregated. We should ensure that the used aggregation operator avoid or at least reduce trade off among dimensions. This aspect was not observed in our reviews and it represents the main limitation of our work. Another limitation of this study refers to the use of only one database and some important studies might not be included in our review. 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.

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.