Sustainability Reporting and Management Control System: A Structured Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review of the paper: Sustainability reporting and management control system: A structured literature review.

Paper: Aims to provide a literature review on intersection between CSR and management control. The research gap well identified while the contribution not articulated. Missing theoretical framework for research, methods described insufficiently to make independent replication. Paper places itself within main stream of the discussion in reporting. The paper at the initial level of expertise, missing contribution and weak editorial.

Suggestion for further development:

1.       Please state you contribution claim at the end of the introduction (but before the structure layout), and linked it to your research gap.

2.       The motivation not persuasive, missing arguments why response to RQ are vital for the research community.

3.       Provide in conclusion section your responses to both of your RQ. I fail to understand how your results links to the question and what was the actual response to them. Perhaps an explanatory paragraph before the structure layout would help.

4.       Literature review,  I suggest to set up additional subsection to explain the timeline of priory literature reviews in the field to develop the reasoning for the research gap claim.

5.       Methodology:

a.       Missing information what types of the methodological approaches were taken in priory literature, what types of the methodologies were considered for this research and reasoning for selection of PRISMA. See (Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020) for portfolio of available review systems.

b.       How you set up the dictionary of potential CRS references terms, at the moment the paper reports the list without the completeness check or without the limitation for dealing with the potential omission to exotic indexation of the keywords.

c.       The decision of the selection of the databases to set up the initial population is unclear, why Web of Science etc. WoS and Scopus tends to have different cover and different bibliometric reporting (e.g. number of citations).

d.       Inclusion and exclusion criteria insufficiently described. A reduction from 337 to 58 items unclear to me from the paper. The quality cross-test vague, how you deal with the different impact, solely based on the TCY?

e.       “Finally, after doing the necessary screening and removal of duplication, we identified a total of 45 papers for further investigation” It does not allowed for independent replication. The reduction of  initial population to coding sample unclear and untested. Consider e.g. citation count regression (Staszkiewicz, 2019)  for either sample reduction or its cross-check (if performed on judgmental basis).

f.        Section 3.6  “To ensure external validity, in step 6 we performed several database searches with different keywords in combination to acquire as comprehensive and relevant search results as possible.” Please be specific what kind of the databases you take into consideration, how you build up the dictionary of search terms.

6.       Discussion        

a.       The paper likely contributes with a conceptual framework of sustainability reporting and management control system. However than the paper is unbalanced in terms of the theory of the conceptual framework development (expected in literature review section), and its linkage to the research method applied (methodology selection) and finally expressing contribution to which field: methodology, conceptualization or…?

Editorial:

The paper is weak at editorial, not formatted in accordance with JRFM requirements,  differences in arrows sized (fig. 12) not explained, ovals, types of rectangles etc., missing appendix A.

Ref.:

Gusenbauer, M. and Haddaway, N.R. (2020), ‘Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta-analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources’, Research Synthesis Methods, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 181–217.

Staszkiewicz, P. (2019), ‘The application of citation count regression to identify important papers in the literature on non-audit fees’, Managerial Auditing Journal, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 96–115.

Author Response

Please check the attached file. Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I am pleased to preview your literature review on Sustainability reporting and management control systems.

Below you will find some suggestions that I hope will help you improve the quality of this version:

- The introduction is often the most challenging section of an article to write. Yours has some room for improvement. In particular, I suggest placing more emphasis on the exogenous drivers that lead the topic of sustainability reporting to emerge as a trending topic. 

- Furthermore, I recommend that authors emphasise the originality of the work in this section. In this regard, I suggest searching the central academic databases (Scopus, web of science and google scholar) for the suggested keywords. In this way, the authors can significantly distinguish their article from those already in the literature.

- Rather than a literature review, I suggest that authors consider a literature review. In other words, in this section, it would be desirable to define the research streams related to the topic and emphasise that this manuscript intends to review the aspects under observation. Consider, for example, the following paper as a suggestion:

- Secinaro, S., Brescia, V., Lanzalonga, F., & Santoro, G. (2022). Smart city reporting: A bibliometric and structured literature review analysis to identify technological opportunities and challenges for sustainable development. Journal of Business Research, 149, 296-313.

- The methodology section should be strengthened. In particular, I suggest that it should be clear why the method used is the best to obtain the results. In this sense, the authors should dwell more on the characteristics of the research design.

- I suggest that the authors justify the keywords used. 

For example, see how it was done: de Bem Machado, A., Secinaro, S., Calandra, D., & Lanzalonga, F. (2022). Knowledge management and digital transformation for Industry 4.0: a structured literature review. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 20(2), 320-338.

- The results appear clear, thank you.

- The implications need more attention. In particular, the theoretical implications should be strengthened about the key topics of the review. Furthermore, the practical implications should be a real stimulus for managers and practitioners. In this sense, the work failed.

- Future lines of research should be implemented. Please consider the following text as a basis for developing future lines of research so that they can be useful and functional for other scholars.

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.06.011

Thank you for your work, and wish you all the best in your future research.

Author Response

Please check the attached file. Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

No more comments.