Making the sustainability journey: drivers, mechanisms and barriers affecting the nexus between non-financial reporting and organizational change

Gianluca Vitale, Sebastiano Cupertino and Angelo Riccaboni

Chapter 8 in Research Handbook on Accounting and Organizational Change, 2025, pp 204-228 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter offers original pieces of evidence on the controversial relationship between non-financial reporting and organizational change, showing how it evolves during a company's sustainability journey. In so doing, the study deepens the drivers, mechanisms and barriers that can affect the investigated relationship. The authors developed a 15-year longitudinal case study and interpreted the empirical results by combining Laughlin's (1991) institutional lens with the Lozano et al. (2016) theoretical framework. The results show that environmental disturbances represent the key driver for a radical change towards sustainability, emphasizing the outside-in approach. The case study underlines the inability of sustainability reporting to trigger transformative organizational change and points out a new form of relationship between sustainability reporting and organizational change: bidirectional but not reciprocal. The chapter offers some practical implications concerning how to manage non-financial issues over time, highlighting the main mechanisms and drivers useful for promoting sustainability integration within companies.

Keywords: Corporate sustainability; Sustainability reporting; Organizational change; Sustainability journey; Institutional theory; Case study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803928906
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