Leveraging accounting – Sustainability managers’ strategic use of accounting and accountants

Accounting scholars have started discussing and exploring how the finance function can or does
collaborate with sustainability managers to establish adequate sustainability reporting structures
and processes and to ensure that sustainability information is used in organizational decision making
and control processes. We focus on sustainability managers and their role in sustainability reporting as well as the company’s decision-making and control processes. We furthermore explore how, in their pursuit to promote a proactive environmental strategy, sustainability managers engage with members of the finance function. In doing so, we aim to contribute to prior research on the role of sustainability managers that, on the one hand, can be seen as a staff profession lacking formal authority (see e.g. Daudigeos, 2013) but, on the other hand, as central
actors in driving sustainable development and change in organizations. We propose that in coping with this ambivalent position sustainability managers may try to mobilize accounting information as well as accounting experts to gain influence in their organization. Through exploring those issues, we add to the literature on the interaction between the sustainability and the finance functions, emphasizing how the former can engage with or even instrumentalize the latter to gain a more powerful position in the organization.