A new taxonomy for examining the multi-role of campus sustainability assessments in organizational change

The role of higher education institutions in the transition to a more sustainable society has been highlighted for almost three decades and the role of environmental management accounting and control in that process of change has also drawn the attention of accounting researchers. By focusing on micro/internal processes within two universities, this paper seeks to examine the multiple roles of campus sustainability assessments in organizational change and to identify the change agents behind the development of this management control system. The findings suggest that sustainability campus assessment is a social construction emerging from the interaction of different stakeholders that requires change agents to create alliances with internal and external stakeholder groups to get institutional support and to trigger the organizational change process. Moreover, the social construction characteristic is useful to understand the existence of multiple roles of campus sustainability assessments in these institutions. The main contribution of the study is thus to propose a new taxonomy for examining the role of campus sustainability assessment in organizational change. These roles are called reflecting, monitoring and planning, comparing and legitimizing.