Marketing

Control (management)

Sustainability reporting

Ecology

Social sustainability

Strategic management

Biology

Sustainability

Management control system

Archaeology

Strategic control

Economics

Computer science

Typology

Sustainability organizations

Business

Corporate sustainability

Process management

Management

Position (finance)

Strategic financial management

Industrial organization

Finance

Knowledge management

Strategic planning

History

Management Accounting Research

Companies struggle to integrate sustainability into their corporate strategy and implement it in their business activities. To examine this issue, we develop an extended version of Gond et al.’s (2012) integration typology that considers all four of Simons’s (1994, 1995) levers of control. We then present a longitudinal study of the efforts made by a multi-national industrial firm to align its management control system and sustainability control system in an integrated sustainability strategy. Our results provide three insights into control system integration for sustainability. First, intensive dialogues among managers at different organizational levels and in different organizational functions mitigate challenges to the technical and organizational integration of sustainability along a firm’s value chain. Second, the degree to which the firm’s strategic-level managers focus on external sustainability drivers influences how well the firm develops and markets sustainability-related products and services. Finally, a committed CEO and strategic-level management can avoid marginalizing sustainability by communicating their beliefs about it through intensive dialogues across management levels. Our results support the position that a firm can manage sustainability by making incremental changes in management control practices.

Management control for sustainability: Towards integrated systems