Development of a sustainable balanced scorecard framework

The balanced scorecard (BSC) has recently been considered a proper tool for evaluating and designing the objectives of corporate sustainability. On the one hand, the theoretical body of literature provides normative sustainable balanced scorecard (SBSC) frameworks to indicate 'what should be measured' or 'what should be done' in order for firms to improve their sustainability performance. On the other hand, the empirical body of literature examines the barriers and the challenges faced by the firms in their endeavor to adopt the proposed normative frameworks. This paper aims at contributing to the theoretical body of literature by developing a new SBSC scoring framework using Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators and scoring-benchmarking techniques to measure the corporate sustainability performance by drawing data from corporate sustainability reports. It also aims at contributing to the empirical body of literature by applying this framework to a sample of Greek firms. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.