Management accounting and control seeks to provide information that substantiates decision-making at all firm levels and thus may also foster ethical decision-making. Against this background, this article presents a systematic literature review of research on management accounting and control and business ethics that has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics. Through this review, we intend to bring to the forefront a research topic that has been widely neglected in broader literature reviews on accounting ethics research and that has (...) been covered by a small number of articles published by traditional leading accounting journals only. Our systematic literature review is guided by a theoretical framework that integrates the decision-facilitating and decision-influencing roles of management accounting and control information and the stages of the ethical decision-making process. Through this theoretical lens, we analyze 64 management accounting and control articles published in the Journal of Business Ethics over more than three decades. Synthesizing and structuring this research, we discuss prior accomplishments and elaborate on avenues for future research. (shrink)

This study examines the extent to which enabling and controlling uses of management control systems moderate the relationship between environmental innovation strategy and organizational performance. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is used to analyze survey data collected from top managers in 175 manufacturing and services sectors representing multinational and local organizations operating in Sri Lanka. We find that while the enabling use of MCS positively moderates the relationship between environmental innovation strategy and organizational performance, in contrast, the controlling use (...) of MCS negatively moderates the relationship. We compare the results for the manufacturing and services sectors. As predicted, we find a significant positive moderating impact of the enabling use of MCS in both manufacturing and services sectors. However, contrary to our expectations, we find no significant moderating impact for both sectors for the controlling use of MCS. We conclude that environmental innovation strategy per se does not lead to performance improvements; however, the extent to which organizations use enabling and controlling MCS determines the relationship. We provide theoretical insights and practical implications concerning the importance of strategic alignment between managerial controls, environmental innovation strategy, and organizational performance. (shrink)

Social and environmental shocks associated with freshwater management are inherently tied with the lives and well-being of all global citizens. Thus, exploring key actors’ roles is a critical element of this grand challenge. Utilizing an inductive multiple case study, we explore sustainability leadership and subsequent organizational perspective-taking behaviours initiated by actors within freshwater management in response to the grand challenge. A vibrant inductive model elicited three main themes: identifying conditions for organizational perspective-taking, modifying organizational frames of reference and emergence of (...) multi-level influence. The discussion extracts critical insights for sustainability leadership and highlights complexities involved in facilitating effective decision-making among diverse actors. Fundamentally, this article contributes a distinct multi-level systems framework for sustainability leadership drawing from social–ecological systems theory and organizational resilience. We conclude by offering future research opportunities within sustainability leadership designed to bridge the gap between grand challenges and our abilities to solve them. (shrink)

What motivates manufacturing companies to make costly investments in producing in an environmentally clean manner? The traditional argument is that such behaviour is value reducing, and that therefore, firms must be forced by regulation to invest in "green" production processes. A counter-argument is that firms have an incentive to make environmental investments in an attempt to attract "green" consumers and investors, hence gaining competitive advantage over their rivals. In this paper, we employ a game-theoretic approach that demonstrates that competing firms' (...) incentives to make voluntary investments in environmental "clean-up" are affected by the size of the investment costs and the extent of consumer and investor "green" awareness. We argue that an increase in green behaviour can be induced by a combination of governmental subsidies for firms that invest in environmentally clean production processes, together with an education program that promotes "green" awareness amongst consumers, investors and the managers themselves. (shrink)