Nonfinancial Reporting and Real Sustainable Change: Relationship Status—It’s Complicated
这篇特刊导言剖析了非财务报告与组织内外真实可持续变革之间的复杂关系，提出一个多层级分析框架来区分企业层面的可持续产出与结果及社会层面的可持续影响，对研究企业可持续报告实际效果的学者有参考价值。
The relationship between nonfinancial reporting and real sustainable change within and beyond organizations is fraught with complication. Furthermore, all facets of the relationship have not been examined equally. The contributions of this special issue made substantive progress in this regard and draw our focus to several remaining complications—in particular, the societal impacts of nonfinancial reporting. With this introduction, we seek to move the conversation forward by proposing a framework that disentangles the linkages between nonfinancial reporting and real sustainable change at multiple levels of analysis. We highlight the distinction between sustainability-related outputs and outcomes that typically materialize at the firm level, and eventually lead to sustainable impact at the societal level. Future research should advance this distinction and scrutinize the impact of real sustainable change beyond firm-level outputs, study the organizational change processes from antecedents to impacts, and examine the interrelationships between different instruments to foster real sustainable change.