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This paper aims to explore the development of sustainability accounting information systems through lens of contingency theory. In this digital age when companies are confronted with massive sets of data, integration of financial and non-financial data, little empirical evidence exists on how sustainability issues are integrated or linked within internal corporate information systems.

A questionnaire-based survey, hypothesis testing, principal component methods and hierarchical clustering are used to provide original empirical evidence from major Lithuanian companies.

The main findings reveal that most companies surveyed include a sustainability strategy in their core strategy, but there is a lack of linkage with measuring and integrating sustainability outcomes within the entirety of corporate financial results. Unexpectedly, the association between stakeholders' involvement and sustainability accounting information system design was not as strong as hypothesized theoretically. Therefore, it deserves further investigation, constituting an important implication for future research. Specifically, three profiles of sustainability accounting information systems were explained, namely, integrated, fragmented and compliance systems.

The limitations of this study relate to the small sample size, as sustainability-related information is still regarded quite confidential.

This result could serve as a specific reference for companies to apply integrated sustainability accounting information systems that might serve as a good practice model for companies, however, fragmented and compliance profiles are the prevailing ones.

The findings are important for fostering corporate social responsibility by developing sustainability accounting information systems.

This paper contributes to the sustainability accounting and information systems literature by providing empirical evidence linking contingent factors with the development of sustainability accounting information systems.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of integrating Sustainable Enterprise Resource Planning (S-ERP) systems and lean manufacturing (LM) practices on sustainability performance, especially in Egypt as an emerging country.

The authors carried out an experimental study with a sample of 144 professional accountants of MPA, MBA and DBA students at two of the top universities in Egypt.

The results provide significant evidence that the integration of S-ERP systems and LM practices implementation improve sustainability performance. However, there is no significant evidence that S-ERP adoption contributes to the success of LM practices implementation.

Because of the chosen research approach, this study is limited to use of a laboratory experiment design. Empirical evidence based on quasi experiments on a field setting would add value to the current literature.

Findings provide practical insights for the manufacturing sector managers into the benefits of integrating S-ERP systems and LM practices for sustainability performance improvement (e.g. reducing cost and waste, increasing operational efficiency). For ERP vendors, findings highlight how ERP vendors introduce “enablers” that incorporate LM best practices into their ERP systems and also how those vendors conform to the software sustainability criteria in the design of ERP applications.

Contrary to previous studies that addressed the individual impact of S-ERP systems and LM practices on performance, this paper experimentally gives an indication of the impact of concurrent implementation of S-ERP and LM practices on sustainability performance, especially in developing countries.

Information infrastructures can enable or constrain how companies pursue their visions of sustainability reporting and help address the urgent need to understand how corporate activity affects sustainability outcomes and how socio-ecological challenges affect corporate activity. The paper examines the relationship between sustainability reporting information infrastructures and sustainability reporting practice.

The paper mobilises a socio-technical perspective and the conception of infrastructure, the socio-technical arrangement of technical artifacts and social routines, to engage with a qualitative dataset comprised of interview and documentary evidence on the development and construction of sustainability reporting information.

The results detail how sustainability reporting information infrastructures are used by companies and depict the difficulties faced in generating reliable sustainability data. The findings illustrate the challenges and measures undertaken by entities to embed automation and integration, and to enhance sustainability data quality. The findings provide insight into how infrastructures constrain and support sustainability reporting practices.

The paper explains how infrastructures shape sustainability reporting practices, and how infrastructures are shaped by regulatory demands and costs. Companies have developed “uneven” infrastructures supporting legislative requirements, whilst infrastructures supporting non-legislative sustainability reporting remain underdeveloped. Consequently, infrastructures supporting specific legislation have developed along unitary pathways and are often poorly integrated with infrastructures supporting other sustainability reporting areas. Infrastructures developed around legislative requirements are not necessarily constrained by financial reporting norms and do not preclude specific sustainability reporting visions. On the contrary, due to regulation, infrastructure supporting disclosures that offer an “inside out” perspective on sustainability reporting is often comparatively well developed.

This paper aims to propose a model which serves to illustrate that a number of factors are responsible for, and contribute to, the different forms of sustainability of digital information services. It also seeks to identify some areas of information research and their interrelationship in the context of sustainability of digital information services.

This research is based on critical analysis of a range of research and policy documents, and an environment scan, in different aspects of sustainability of information systems and services. Recent and relevant past research studies as well as some relevant government policies and initiatives have been critically analyzed in order to identify various factors that are said to contribute to the economic, social and environmental sustainability of information services.

It is noted that the sustainability of information has not been studied within the mainstream information science research. However, several previous research studies have produced findings and models that can be used to achieve some aspects of sustainability of information. It is also noted that various parameters of sustainability are inter-related and hence a proper research agenda has to be prepared, and concerted research efforts are needed in order to be able to develop and manage sustainable digital information services.

A model has been proposed showing the various factors to be studied for achieving the economic, social and environmental sustainability of information services. Interrelations among the different factors and their implications for sustainability of digital information systems services are also discussed.

The model is expected to open new vistas for research in the economic, social and environmental sustainability of digital information systems and services. It will develop new tools, technologies and applications for building sustainable information systems and services appropriate for the digital era.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a re‐orientation of the way the concept of sustainability is dealt with in relation to information systems, positioning human behaviour and the processing of knowledge at the centre of the concept.

The concept of sustainability of knowledge (SoK), which refers to processes that govern knowledge, is employed to define sustainable information systems (SIS). Following this definition, knowledge aspects are employed to tackle the notion of sustainability. The sustainability approach presented in this paper is then translated into requirements needed for designing a SIS.

Three knowledge aspects are found to be relevant for the design of SIS: adaptability, offloading and knowledge evaluation. The service oriented‐based architecture (SOA) seems to be appropriate to support the proposed approach.

The conceptual approach proposed need to be evaluated by case studies to be performed in different organizations.

A knowledge based perspective is proposed to re‐orient the notion of sustainability. Moreover, an SOA architecture is used to design a system based on the proposed approach.

This paper aims to theorize and assess a structural model that depicts the impact of an organization's capability to share information with supply chain partners through a focused green information system for the purpose of improving environmental performance.

Data were collected from 159 manufacturing managers and analyzed using a structural equation modeling methodology.

The general capability to share information with supply chain partners coupled with the specific capabilities of green information systems enhances environmental performance. Green information systems serve as a partial mediator to the relationship between supply chain information sharing and environmental performance.

While environmental sustainability has implications for all categories of supply chain partners, the study sample focuses on the manufacturing sector only.

Evidence supports the need for manufacturers to develop information sharing and green information system capabilities to improve environmental performance.

This is one of the first studies to empirically assess the role of information systems in achieving environmental sustainability. The results of this investigation support the proposition that information sharing among supply chain partners is a key to achieving environmental sustainability.

There is a growing awareness by researchers and practitioners of organizations' ecological responsibilities. Past research in management suggests that it is important to develop ecological sustainability, a long‐missing piece of the sustainability puzzle, together with economic sustainability and social sustainability. However, little research has been conducted to explore how information systems (IS), as one of the defining technologies in human society, can help organizations develop ecological sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a conceptual model and propositions with regard to the roles of IS in the pursuit of ecological sustainability.

The paper focuses on how organizations are motivated to act in the same legitimate way (i.e. eco‐friendly way) and proposes institutional theory as a lens to better understand how IS can be leveraged to achieve the three milestones of ecological sustainability, i.e. eco‐efficiency, eco‐equity and eco‐effectiveness.

The model advocates that under different institutional pressures, IS can be leveraged to achieve eco‐efficiency, eco‐equity and eco‐effectiveness through automating, informating (up and down) and transforming organizations, respectively. Research limitations/implications – The paper calls for the incorporation of the dimension of natural environment into our framework for future investigation of the IS roles in organizations.

The paper highlights the importance for practitioners to understand the environmental impact of the IS that they design or use, and the roles that IS can play in facilitating the large‐scale learning about ecological sustainability.

The implications of this research for both practice and academia are discussed, with a brief outlook towards future research.

This paper aims to revisit the adoption reasons of enterprise systems (ES) and supply chain management systems (SCMS) and to explore the new dimensions of sustainability required to be added in the whole process of adoption of these systems. Moreover, it aims to explore the benefits of ES to organizations and to relate these benefits to the ES adoption in future sustainable city settings. Future cities will have micro-industries requiring dynamic interactions and will be dependent on efficient supply chains. The recent developments in information and communications technology (ICT) such as cloud computing through its dynamic, on-demand and service-based delivery are making it possible to achieve those goals for supply chains. The ES in general and more specifically SCMS have integrated organizations into one seamless mesh.

This paper presents a framework for adoption of sustainable ES in a smart city setting. The framework, firstly, is presented at a macro-level, particularly incorporating the relative significance of motivational factors for sustainable ES adoption. Subsequently, The authors study the benefits of ES as perceived by large and small and medium enterprise (SME) organizations using 100 case studies and discuss how these benefits can be realized for smart cities by projecting the ES benefits onto the proposed framework. The benefits are estimated with the Shang and Seddon’s (2002) framework.

The adoption of ES initiated with environmental factors and mediated with business and technical factors will bring benefits in all the dimensions of triple bottom line in addition to the firm’s performance. ES will have pivotal role in future smart city settings and will be able to offer social, environmental and economic sustainability in addition to traditional organizational performance indicators.

The proposed framework for ES adoption will bring ES packages (particularly, the required relative significance of adoption reasons) into the perspective of sustainable development. Moreover, the study of its benefits in relation to the proposed sustainable ES adoption framework presented in this paper will help in motivating organizations to incorporate social, economic and environmental sustainability into their core business objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of guiding sustainability principles for the information systems function in organisations.

The authors use principles taken from sustainability approaches to define a set of principles and a sustainability maturity model.

The principles include awareness, alternatives to economic perspectives, systems approaches, minimise wastage, consider the future, avoid fads, link sustainability to IT governance frameworks.

The paper calls for a new line of research investigating the contribution that IS can make to the sustainability issue.

The principles and maturity model can be used by practitioners to embed sustainability processes into their organisations.

The issue of sustainability and IS is still in its infancy as a research topic. The authors define a basic set of sustainability principles and raise a number of governance issues related to sustainability.

In the growing debate about designing new management control systems (MCS) to include stakeholder values, there has been little discussion about information overload. Stakeholder advocates call for including more environmental and related social disclosures but do not consider how information overload might impair the use and interpretation of corporate performance measures. As we know, shareholders and boards of directors are most concerned with market data such as earnings per share, dividend rates, and market value growth. In this chapter, we assert that management control system designers must consider information overload before expanding the MCS to include social and nonfinancial disclosures.

The paradox in expanding MCS is that demand for sustainability performance measures will likely result in overload for both information preparers and information users. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and similar sustainability disclosures are likely to overload MCS and overwhelm the readers and users by performance reports that include multiple dimensions.

CSR affects the design of companies' annual reports because stakeholders are increasingly concerned with how organizations address their social responsibilities and how they disclose their societal responses. Management accountants are accustomed to providing performance measures within an organization and MCS usually have an internal focus. CFOs are often not accustomed to balancing the needs of stakeholders with those of managers and owners. We suggest that companies and CFOs will face an information overload dilemma in making these determinations, and that users will be overloaded in sifting through the multiple dimensions of information that are increasingly being provided. We suggest that the bias toward financial performance measures will distort both the provision of relevant information and the use of sustainability performance measures. We modified the Epstein and Roy sustainability model (2001) to illustrate some of these potential impacts.

We note that the balanced scorecard (BSC) was developed as one such tool to reflect and communicate multiple measures. We summarize a previous study showing how managers ignored multiple performance measures in a performance scorecard study. We then relate our results to some of the information overload literature to support our suggestion that stakeholders will face many of the same information overload issues and constraints when using and processing social disclosures.

Our summary of the information overload literature results in a call for more interdisciplinary information overload research involving real-world contexts and tasks. We note that most of the extant information overload literature is restricted to discipline-based silo-oriented studies and to simplistic evaluations, brand identification, or forecasting tasks. Our study went into some depth to describe the business, its strategies and objectives, and a comparison of actual results to specific goals. As management control systems evolve or are designed to report sustainability data, the issues surrounding increasing complexity and information overload will become exponentially problematic. We suggest that future research also include consideration of information overload conditions facing preparers and disclosers of sustainability measures.