SUSTAINABILITY AND MANAGEMENT CONTROL: EXPLORING AND THEORIZING ON CONTROL PATTERNS IN LARGE EUROPEAN FIRMS

Purpose of the research A growing body of literature argues that management control is essential in promoting corporate sustainability (Epstein and Roy, 2001; Crittenden et al., 2011). Furthermore, the conventional accounting and control literature has identified sustainability and control as an important emerging theme (Berry et al., 2009). Nevertheless, except a series of conceptual (and often prescriptive) papers, few papers have proposed to empirically explore management control practices for sustainability. This explains partly the scepticism that has been raised about the existence of these management controls in the context of sustainability and especially about their role in promoting sustainability within the organizations (Deegan, 2002; Norris and O’Dwyer, 2004; Durden, 2008). Based on these observations, this paper aims at exploring sustainability management control practices in large European firms. It investigates the extent to which large companies have developed a package of formal and informal management control mechanisms in order to steer their organization towards corporate sustainability and, based on this empirical observations, it theorizes on typical sustainability control patterns. Principal results All of the researched companies deploy sustainability management control. There are, however, notable differences with regard to the complexity of the underlying systems and tools – from basic to advanced ones. The paper also identifies two distinct approaches in management control for sustainability. Whereas some companies seem to focus on formal approaches of management control, others concentrate on informal management control. A mixture of both was not observed in the sample companies. Major conclusions The insights and recommendations provided in this paper help organizations in translating their aspirations into their organization (Epstein and Wisner, 2005). The results also highlight the need for research to better understand the situations in which formal and informal management control for sustainability yields the results anticipated