Building Green Strategies

: An Empirical Comparison of Sustainable Balanced Scorecards Architectures

Abstract

Sustainability progressively became an urgent concern throughout the world, including for organizations. Consequently, research regarding corporate sustainability has increased exponentially over the past twenty years, exploring ways for firms to improve and assess their environmental and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) performance. The Sustainable Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) emerged through this research as a possible way to include sustainability within the performance of an organization. If research has already explored and detailed different ways to build such SBSCs, and discussed their theoretical benefits and drawbacks, they have not been empirically compared yet. The present paper aims to achieve precisely that. Through a real-world case study, using data-built strategy maps, four different SBSC architectures were compared via a qualitative study. Positively answering to interview invitations, six respondents from the concerned organization, all occupying different positions, helped identifying each architecture’s features by sharing their impressions on each architecture, as well as their global sentiment on the framework, backed by their experience and their line of work. The present paper identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each architecture in a real-world case study based on opinions from an organization’s experts, and tries to identify situations where some architectures may be more relevant to use than others.

Date of Award	22 Aug 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Bertrand Gallez (Supervisor)