Sustainability and stakeholder management: the need for new corporate performance evaluation and reporting systems

Abstract

Corporate sustainability, that is the capacity of a firm to continue operating over a long period of time, depends on the sustainability of its stakeholder relationships. This new stakeholder view of the firm goes beyond previous work on the triple bottom line and balanced scorecard. Companies need appropriate systems to measure and control their own behaviour in order to assess whether they are responding to stakeholder concerns in an effective way and to communicate the results achieved. These sustainability accounting systems should have the purpose of broadening and integrating the traditional financial approaches to corporate performance measurement, taking stakeholder needs into due account. This article presents the sustainability evaluation and reporting system (SERS), an integrated methodology aimed at monitoring and tracking from a qualitative and quantitative viewpoint the overall corporate performance according to a stakeholder framework, in line with small and medium‐sized enterprises' managerial requirements. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.