Investigating the links between ethical, social and environmental accounting and strategic management practices through enterprise modelling: technical report

Enterprise modelling has been used traditionally to elicit and document phenomena related to organisations. It has proven to be valueble within research and industry projects in the domains of enterprise engineering and information systems engineering. Yet, in this work, we apply enterprise modelling as a research method to investigate the links between ethical, social and environmental accounting (a.k.a. sustainability reporting) and strategic management practices. Such links have been theorised or anecdotically reported in scientific literature within the fields of sustainability management, accounting, corporate social responsibility, and corporate governance. But, to date, there has been no rigorous investigation into the concrete ways in which both practices interrelate. In this work, we conduct six literature-based case studies and five observational case studies within large companies, applying enteprise modelling to reveal the links between sustainability reporting and strategic management and document them. We have found evidences in all case studies, demonstrating that such form of accounting has value for stragegic management, who uses the reported results to steer the company and determine organisational policies. Strategic managers also provide input that the accounting department uses to adapt the ethical, social and environmental accounting method to the needs of strategic managers. These results open up new avenues of research in sustainability reporting, and supports our claim that enterprise modelling is a valid and useful research method beyond enterprise and information systems engineering.