Paolo Perego

Planetary Boundaries: Ecological Foundations for Corporate Sustainability

Management studies on corporate sustainability practices have grown considerably. The field now has significant knowledge of sustainability issues that are firm and industry focused. However, complex ecological problems are increasing, not decreasing. In this paper, we argue that it is time for corporate sustainability scholars to reconsider the ecological and systemic foundations for sustainability, and to integrate our work more closely with the natural sciences. To address this, our paper introduces a new development in the natural sciences – the delineation of nine ‘Planetary Boundaries’ which govern life as we know it. We call for more systemic research that measures the impact of companies on boundary processes that are at, or possibly beyond, three threshold points – climate change, the global nitrogen cycle, and rate of biodiversity loss – and closing in on others. We also discuss practical implications of the Planetary Boundaries framework for corporate sustainability, including governance and institutional challenges.

The Effects of Leadership Styles and Use of Performance Measures on Managerial Work-Related Attitudes

In this paper we investigate the effects of superiors’ performance evaluation behaviors on subordinates’ work-related attitudes. In response to critique on the multidimensional nature of the ‘supervisory style’ construct in the RAPM literature, we argue that the two dominant dimensions underlying this construct are leadership style and performance measure use. We develop and test a path model that allows us to disentangle the effects of leadership style (initiating structure and consideration) and performance measure use (objective and subjective measures) on managerial work-related attitudes (goal clarity and evaluation fairness). We test our hypotheses using survey data from 196 middle-level managers in 11 organizations. Results show that an initiating structure leadership style affects subordinates’ work-related attitudes through the use of objective performance measures. Consideration leadership behavior instead only has a direct impact on work-related attitudes. These findings have important implications for management accounting research on superiors’ use of performance measures, and provide an explanation of some of the problematic findings in the literature.

Carbon Accounting: Challenges for Research in Management Control and Performance Measurement: Carbon Accounting

Carbon reduction programs and corporate emissions reporting have expanded rapidly across firms in response to climate change and global warming. This development is partly driven by institutional demands and partly by value creation considerations. The consequences of these developments for management accounting and control (MAC) are not clear, despite anecdotal evidence that suggests an increasing effort to incorporate carbon accounting into traditional decision and reporting processes. The reasons for this lack of clarity are the disproportionate focus in practice on carbon disclosure, compared to a small number of empirical studies, and the absence of an academic debate in this novel area from a MAC perspective. This paper seeks to stimulate such an academic debate by reviewing the extant literature, identifying key theoretical and empirical shortcomings of extant academic research, and outlining some directions for future studies on carbon accounting. These directions are inspired by more established MAC research that may help to guide and organize MAC research in the emerging and exciting field of carbon accounting.

Sticky Cost Behaviour: Evidence from Small and Medium Sized Companies

This paper investigates whether cost stickiness occurs in small and medium sized companies using a sample of Italian nonlisted and listed firms during the period 1999–2008. Our findings show that cost stickiness emerges only for the total cost of labour and not for selling, general and administrative (SG&A) costs, cost of goods sold and operating costs. Stickiness of operating costs is only detected in a sample of listed companies. We further contribute to the literature on sticky cost behaviour by discussing critical issues associated with the extant approach of empirical analysis and interpretation of sticky cost behaviour.

Den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen: Controller auf der Suche nach Nachhaltigkeit

Im Laufe der letzten Jahre hat das Thema Nachhaltigkeit unter Finanzfachleuten an Bedeutung gewonnen. Traditionell legen Finanzfachleute eher Wert auf das Thema Nachhaltigkeit, da aus reputativer oder operativer Sicht ansonsten zu grose Risiken bestehen. Viel wichtiger jedoch ist eine Entwicklung, in der Finanzfachleute realisieren, dass Nachhaltigkeit eine treibende Kraft fur die Verbesserung von Leistungsmetriken ist, jene wertvollere Daten uber das Unternehmen und seine Umwelt erfassen. Diese Entwicklung hat einen positiven Effekt auf die Qualitat von unternehmerischen Entscheidungen. Der vorliegende Beitrag bietet einen Uberblick uber jungste theoretische und praktische Entwicklungen in diesem Feld und erortert, was diese Entwicklungen fur die Rolle von Finanzfachleuten, wie etwa Controllern, bedeuten.

Pulling the Right Levers to Enable Customer Centricity: The Role of Organizational Architecture

This paper investigates the crucial role of a firm’s organizational architecture in enabling customer centricity. We first summarize the literature in both marketing and accounting that examined the relationships among different elements of an organizational architecture with regard to customer centricity. We then provide the results of an online survey conducted among a sample of subscription-based companies that builds upon extant gaps in the literature. Our exploratory findings reveal that the availability of innovative customer metrics (such as Customer Lifetime Value) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a customer-centric strategy to deliver higher levels of performance. The samples firms appear above all to suffer from a weak integration between Marketing and Accounting & Finance functions, also due to a limited adoption of customer metrics in incentive and compensation systems. Our study documents that firms need to pull the right levers of their organizational architectures if they intend to fully exploit customer centricity.