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To effectively integrate sustainability education into accounting, the needs of stakeholders such as educators, practitioners, regulators, students, and politicians must be considered. While existing literature reflects their separate perceptions, this study considers their influence on the integration process. Sustainability accounting can play a key role in supporting sustainability practices, which businesses need to be accountable for. This study focuses on how sustainability accounting education can improve corporate sustainability practices. However, most existing studies only consider one stakeholder group, and there is a gap in literature on sustainability accounting education in developing countries, particularly in the Middle East. This study informs future researchers about various research gaps in sustainability education.

This chapter contributes to the Public Value (PV) literature in relation to accounting by providing evidence on its content's operationalization through performance measurement. In particular, it establishes the link with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which may work as guiding principles of a public organization’s action. Accordingly, organizations embedding SDGs include them in their strategic decisions and disclose them through performance measurement and narratives.

The SDGs' presence is explored in the PV of a sample of Italian health institutes through documentary analysis of their performance plans. The aim is to verify if and how SDGs are pursued and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has affected PV content.

Besides Goal No. 3 (Health), the PV content of the investigated institutes contains various SDGs. Before the pandemic, their PV was aligned with SDGs mainly related to prosperity, economic growth and social inclusion. In the following period, the number of SDGs increased, introducing planet and environmental protection dimensions. No one explicitly mentions pursuing SDGs, revealing a non-institutionalized sensitivity of managers towards SDGs. The analysis distinguishes between ‘core’ SDGs, revealed mostly by traditional performance measures disclosing the achievement of institutes' mission, and ‘complementary’ SDGs, expressed mostly through narratives. This can derive from performance measurement, which employs the language of performativity, while the contribution to society is relegated in the narratives, making them less incisive.

Drawing on managerial innovation model proposed by Abrahamson (1991), this chapter tries to gain a better understanding of how the UN SDGs have impacted the practice of sustainability reporting of Spanish public universities. Data were collected from a variety of sources, such as: several email structured interviews with university managers, an examination of the Chancellor letters of sustainability reports of Spanish public universities, a detailed reading of some sustainability reports and a consultation of the website of each Spanish public university. The findings reveal that there has been an increasing number of Spanish public universities that have started to publish stand-alone sustainability reporting since the appearance of the UN SDGs. According to Abrahamson's framework, our findings reveal that governmental-policy forces have shaped the sustainability reporting landscape in the Spanish public university setting, and their behaviour is mostly explained by the forced-selection and fad/fashion perspectives.

This chapter aims to contribute to the literature on sustainability in the public sector by discussing how human resource and human resource management can help to integrate environmental management into organizations and improve environmental performance. Public sector scholars have neglected the study of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) until now. Nevertheless, implementing such practices could lead to positive outcomes regarding awareness of environmental issues, organizational reputation and attractiveness, job satisfaction and organizational performance. The authors discuss the relevance and the necessity of developing a field of research on GHRM in public organizations. Starting from a conceptual review of the main literature on GHRM, this chapter provided some directions for future research.

This study investigates the impact of business strategy on earnings management practices for financial and non-financial firms in Oman. To assess the research objective, 430 firm-year observations from 2015 to 2019 were employed in the study. Using regression analysis, the findings suggest that differentiation strategy positively affects earnings management in financial sector firms. In addition, cost leadership strategy positively affects earnings management in non-financial sector firms. This indicates that business strategy is associated with company leaders managing their earnings while they are trying to survive through competition. These findings are useful for regulators, as they can introduce mechanisms to curb earnings management practices and instil more faith in investors.

On the one hand, there is a long tradition of approaching management control and innovation as opposites that prompt organisational tensions. On the other hand, recent studies have shown that management control may foster innovation and promote innovative behaviour. At the same time, both these perspectives focus on innovation management, and discussions regarding the role of management control in innovation leadership are conspicuously absent from the literature. In this chapter, we analyse how innovation leaders use management control in two service companies. We demonstrate that, in contrast to innovation managers who employ management control systems primarily for planning, monitoring, and evaluation purposes, innovation leaders use management control for advocacy, engagement, and visibility.

In recent years, international bodies and public opinion have recommended that governments adopt social responsibility practices to inform and be accountable to citizens about their sustainability actions in environmental, social and economic fields (Galera et al., 2014) and restore citizens' confidence in public authorities (Crane et al., 2008; Shepherd et al., 2010). This chapter reviews the literature on measuring and reporting sustainable performance in the public sector. Analyzing 35 studies published in a period of 10 years (from 2012 to 2021), we address two specific research questions: How and to what extent have public organizations changed to integrate sustainability reporting (SR) systems? What are the enabling organizational factors in adopting SR in public organizations?