Evaluating Sustainability: a Need for Standards

Abstract

Sustainability is one of the most used words in relation to business activity and reporting at present, but its meaning is vague. We argue that its use is based upon the concepts of stewardship and of the firm as going concerned, coupled with the traditional view of the transformational processof a business. We further argue that this is problematic in the present global environment when stewardship of resources is becoming paramount. We therefore argue that sustainability is actually based upon efficiency in the transformational process and equity in the distribution of effects. We therefore argue for the need for standards in analysing and measuring sustainability and outline a more complete model which recognises distributional implications, and is developed into a model of operationalisability