Abstract:

Globalization, competitiveness, and increased marketplace complexities force businesses to operate in a challenging and dynamic environment. Climate change agreements and circular economy needs, have also created various challenges for businesses, particularly in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Usually, companies’ operations leave a footprint that impacts human beings socially, economically, and environmentally, and these practices need to be considered in daily operating practices. While progress has been made in the realm of teaching about sustainability in higher education institutions, integrating sustainability into experiential learning of family firms’ leaders has been identified by leading scholars as an area for improvement and a necessity to help the decision process making in the specific context of family businesses. Usually, family firms are SMEs, in which managers frequently do not have adequate academic training and present levels of financial literacy that are not adjusted to the corporate decision-making process. Additionally, they do not acknowledge the importance of sustainability in their daily practices. The purpose of this paper is to describe the current state of the art in bibliographic and bibliometric terms considering sustainability reports published by companies as a complement to financial reports, to capture the current literacy level of business owners and their sustainability educational needs. The paper sheds new light on a still under-researched area, suggesting several implications and avenues for future research in Sustainability reporting and Family Firms Boards of Education/Knowledge. Nowadays, the felt pressure from stakeholders compels businesses to prove their governance effectiveness, accountability, and transparency through corporate sustainability disclosure. The market demands more sustainable practices and is aware of environmental, social, and governance practices, as well as attentive to corporate social responsibility practices, demanding more sustainable products and practices. To outfit sundry stakeholder needs and achieve unceasing improvement, businesses must engage with targeted stakeholders and obtain eloquent feedback on their sustainability performance and reporting processes. This in turn would help to meet stakeholders’ demands and improves businesses’ future sustainability agenda. However, it is noticed that not all firms release their sustainability reports, not even to meet the imposed legislation requirements, not because they do not care, but because they do not possess the knowledge for that. Through deepening into the academic literature, this paper proposes to describe how business owners commit to sustainability reporting, with an emphasis on family firms. Furthermore, this work allows us to check whether family firms benefit from educational and learning experiences. If they are involved with experiential learning, they will take advantage of the experience in several dimensions, namely in: i) personal characteristics, such as persistence and creativity ii) academic results, increasing their skills, knowledge, critical thinking, and the ability to understand and analyze complex problems and; iii) social outcomes, such as the self-esteem and empowerment.

Keywords:

Sustainability Reporting, Family Firms, Knowledge and Education, Literature Review.