Corporate Sustainability Assessment: A Historical Review

The main aim of the review is to build a general understanding about how corporate sustainability researchers propose evaluating corporate sustainability and how the proposed models and frameworks changed over time. The review is done from the perspective of several aspects, focusing on the methods, tools and models proposed for corporate sustainability assessment, noting the business level of evaluation (the company level, a broader industry of value chain level, or a narrower product or process level). Other two aspects of the research were the definition of sustainability in the proposed models with regards to sustainability dimensions, and different empirical studies executed using the theoretical models proposed. The review includes 30 papers, focusing on corporate sustainability evaluation, assessments and measurement, published from 1997 to 2010.