Corporate Sustainability: the Fit between Demand and Measurement

In the last two decades corporate sustainability has gained significant attention from both research and practice, and fundamentally shapes managerial decision-making, investors’ pricing of financial instruments as well as policy-makers envisaging taxes (or levies) on certain industries or production-types. In this article we focus on two aspects among the several surfacing in the literature: (a) who is interested in corporate sustainability, and why? And (b) how to overcome and reconcile issues related to measurement and assessment of sustainability performance. I argue that the debate on corporate sustainability can be approached from several perspectives (e.g., society, investors, and regulators) and each has its unique features (e.g., sustainability is in the eye of the beholder); in turn, such differences matter also in terms of measurement and disclosure. The latter is the field in which most of the progresses are expected to be made in the future.