Opening the black boxes of sustainability performance measurement

Abstract

The overall motivation of this research is grounded on an interesting thread in organizational research, ethnostatistics, which argues that the processes of measurement (data construction, analysis and final presentation) and the construction of metrics imply tacit assumptions and informal practices employed by the producers of metrics. Keeping this assumption in mind I develop two studies exploring the field of sustainability performance measurement, followed by a methodological discussion on the proper use of the ethnostatistical method in organization and management research. In the first study, I conduct a systematic literature review to identify the foundational conceptualizations of sustainability and its measurement employed in the management and organization field. To address this need, I design a novel research process grounded in the systematic literature review tradition. A meta-ethnographic research synthesis was performed to formalize the emerging grand narratives produced from the integration and/or comparison of findings from the different studies. This paper makes the following theoretical contributions: 1) I formalize the foundational conceptualizations of sustainability and its measurements and 2) trace their historical progression. Such an analysis provides a rigorous synthesis of patterns in the literature and enables avenues for future research to be identified. The second study is informed by an ethnographic research aimed at disentangling the sustainability reporting dynamics in order to understand the organizational field forces that affect its realization. The study employs a combination of first- and third-order ethnostatistical analyses and a grounded theory approach to investigate the practices of sustainability reporting at a large multinational company, rated as one of the industry leaders in sustainability for the past five years as per the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices. The key contribution of the study is the development of a theoretical framework explaining the various types of organizational field pressures that are actively re-shaping the corporation’s sustainability agenda. Sustainability reporting is conceptualized as a balancing act of complying and adapting to the demands for the organization field (institutions, external stakeholders and other actors), and a strategic tool to maintain and control the company's legitimacy status. Another key insight from the study is the identification of a co-creation mechanism, which theoretically overcomes the sole reliance on the institutional paradigm and offers additional proposition that sustainability reporting can be conceptualized as a socially constructed reality. The third essay contributes to the ethnostatistical method by discussing the intersection between history and ethnography while suggesting method for their complementary use in organizational and management research. In particular, it argues that although some valuable contributions employing ethnostatistical approach to organizational settings have appeared, management and organization scholars seem to be failing to deliver a proper ethnography of metrics construction (first-order ethnostatistics) and used instead quasi-historical approaches to reconstruct the historical context in which data were produced. To address this issue the study i) presents practical techniques for conducing ethnostatistical research in live organizational settings and ii) discusses how historical approaches which focus on source criticism and contextual reconstruction could overcome the limitations of pure ethnographies, thus offering a pluralistic method for conducting ethnostatistical research. Collectively, the three studies discuss general problems of quantification (both within the field of sustainability performance measurement and in general) while offering a critical point of view.