Social, environmental and sustainability reporting and organisational value creation?

Purpose The objective of this essay is to examine the extent to which social, environmental and sustainability accounting and reporting (SEA) can or should contribute to shareholder value and, correspondingly, to consider the challenge that SEA can offer to the conventional views of “value” that underpin traditional financial accounting. The essay is then used as a vehicle to introduce some relatively new data about sustainable development that has implications for our consideration of “value”. Design/methodology/approach Although drawing from a wide range of secondary contextual data, the paper is primarily argumentative and seeks to challenge a number of implicit assumptions within both conventional and more…