Aideen O'Dochartaigh
University College Dublin
Aideen O'Dochartaigh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Quinn School of Business, University College Dublin, specialising in corporate sustainability and social and environmental accounting. She completed her PhD in 2014 at the University of St Andrews, Scotland and was the recipient of an IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2015.
This paper presents the results of a content analysis of sustainability disclosures produced by organisations of different ownership structure and objectives, namely large PLCs, values-based SMEs, social enterprises and... [ view full abstract ]
This paper presents the results of a content analysis of sustainability disclosures produced by organisations of different ownership structure and objectives, namely large PLCs, values-based SMEs, social enterprises and co-owned businesses. The extant sustainability reporting literature suggests that organisations typically do not engage with sustainability in a substantive manner in their related public utterances, largely failing to address critical sustainability issues such as environmental limits, equity and future generations.
The sustainability reporting literature has typically focused on large PLCs, but a number of scholars argue that this type of organisation cannot support sustainable development. The shareholder value maximisation model is counter-intuitive to some of the critical elements of sustainability such as limits to growth, intergenerational equity and the maintenance of critical natural capital. It is increasingly suggested that organisations with different objectives, such as social enterprises and values-based enterprises, and with different ownership structures, such as co-operatives or partnerships, are more likely to engage with the critical issues of sustainability.
In this study, we use Young and Tilley’s (2006) Sustainable Entrepreneurship Model as a content analysis framework to identify the level of engagement with critical issues of sustainability, including eco-effectiveness, economic equity and sufficiency, in the sustainability disclosures of forty organisations of varying objectives and ownership structures.
The results of our analysis suggest that the dominant issues engaged with in sustainability reporting, regardless of the entity’s objectives or ownership structure, are eco-efficiency, social responsibility and environmental sustainability. While social enterprises, values-based SMEs and co-operatives are slightly more likely to engage with critical issues of sustainability like environmental limits, sufficiency and intergenerational equity, this difference is not statistically significant. Overall, substantive engagement with these critical issues is low, typically restricted to a number of high performing outliers, which fall across the spectrum of organisation types. We urge accounting and management scholars to engage with these critical elements of sustainability and explore how they can (or cannot) be addressed at an organisational level.
