Constructing Corporate Sustainability in a Danish IT Company

Sustainability reporting is facing a challenging conjunction, both political and conceptually. Taking up the call of accounting scholar Rob Gray to provide different “accounts” of corporation (un)sustainability, this paper applies a post-Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach to studying sustainability reporting by employing a longitudinal qualitative reading of a single company’s reports. On the basis of this constructivist epistemology, the paper argues that the IT company cBrain constructed successive yet different versions of sustainability over a 15+ year period. The paper identifies four distinct temporal periods and versions of sustainability: Pre-Compliance, Digital Bureaucracy, Closing the Time Gap, and European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) Alignment. These notions of sustainability are accreted on top of one another, but are all constructed in relation to and ultimately serving cBrain’s business model and goals. However, drawing on the post-ANT orientation of reading reports with both a critical as well as material-semiotic eye, the paper eschews simply criticizing cBrain’s practice in favor of highlighting the implications for how corporations selectively construct sustainability.