Reflexivity in Sustainability Accounting and Management: Transcending the Economic Focus of Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

In order to enable firms to successfully deal with issues of corporate sustainability, the firms' stakeholders would need to participate in sustainability accounting and management. In practice, however, participative sustainability accounting and management are often unfeasible. The resulting consequence is the risk of misbalancing single aspects of sustainability. The purpose of this article is to show that reflexivity in sustainability accounting and management, that is, an ongoing reflection on the relationship between the goals of corporate sustainability and the overarching objective of sustainable development can, at least, mitigate this problem. Reflexivity has the potential to initiate processes of collective learning and could eventually bring about the realization of business models that integrate economic, ecological, and social considerations.