Professor Adam Lindgreen publishes new research anthology

Together with his colleagues Professor Christine Vallaster, Dr. Shumaila Yousafzai, and Professor Bernhard Hirsch, Professor Adam Lindgreen publishes new research anthology: Measuring and Controlling Sustainability.

The notion of sustainability has enjoyed greater popularity in recent decades. In essence, sustainable efforts are those that firms undertake to capture and create social value, while also reducing their environmental footprint. Such efforts often coincide with attempts to capture and create economic value. These overlapping frameworks produce combined notions, such as shared value, corporate social entrepreneurship, corporate social innovation, and strategic corporate social responsibility. Sustainable actions offer new responses to societal challenges, such that they affect social interactions and have implications for a wide range of stakeholders. Many initiatives in this field accordingly build on cross-sector collaboration. But because civil society, business, and the public sector have different structural logics, the measures and controls for success differ across these cooperating actors.

Therefore, efforts to establish the measurement and control of sustainability have produced notable tools, but those instruments lack applicability in practice. Increasing the level of standardization of such tools also seems difficult to achieve, because the contexts surrounding the focal organizations differ considerably. Therefore, this research anthology provides an assessment in 17 chapters, organized into four main topic sections:

• Organizations and social value creation: Concepts, responsibilities, and barriers
• Accounting, measurement, performance, and diffusion of social value
• Practical and managerial insights from real-life cases
• Choices, incentives, guidance, and ethics