Introduction

Sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) refer to a company’s activities which include social and environmental concerns in business operations and various forms of interaction with its stakeholders. Transparency, public disclosure, stakeholder engagement and management, business model, information management, and so on should all be tailored to be in line with the context and specific objectives of sustainability and CSR pursued by a company.

In this context, sustainability accounting is seen to play a central role as it can support the implementation of the sustainability strategy, embedding sustainability into day-to-day operations and decision making, and developing relationships with stakeholders based on trust and legitimacy. It comprises, in fact, internal and external accounting practices and mechanisms devoted to measure, represent and communicate the company’s performance, and embraces environmental, social, and economic aspects of the business life and their relationships. Among these mechanisms, sustainability/CSR disclosure has become a prominent phenomenon, consistently with the legitimacy theory and the stakeholder theory. Such theories consider the company as part of an open system where different subjects interact with each other. This system-oriented understanding of the company highlights the role of information and disclosure in the relations among organizations, institutions, individuals, and groups. In particular, legitimacy theory postulates that a company aims to measure and communicate its performance consistently with the expectations of different societal groups in order to (re)gain or maintain its social acceptance and legitimacy. Stakeholder theory provides another useful frame for understanding the existence, role, and nature of CSR disclosure. In fact, information and communication represent some of the most important ways through which the company engages with different stakeholder groups in order to obtain their support and approval, or, vice versa, to try to remove their opposition and disapproval.