Assessing and Driving Societal Impact: Introduction to the themed section on Overcoming Shortcomings of Measuring Organizational Sustainability

Myriads of sustainability measurement schemes are in place to assess the societal impact of firms and other organizations. While these schemes aim to encourage positive social and environmental outcomes, they often fall short. We identify interest comprehensiveness, cognitive accuracy, and practical feasibility as the aspired dimensions of these schemes to argue why they are bound to be imperfect. Next to difficulties within each dimension, sustainability measurement schemes face inherent tensions between the three dimensions, which we conceptualize as commensuration, scope, and scale ambivalence. We introduce the three papers for this themed section that develop salient frameworks and rich empirical insights into these tensions as well as the upsides of sustainability measurement schemes from very different theoretical and methodical perspectives. We conclude that while the inherent tensions within and between the aspired dimensions render the accomplishment of perfect schemes a mission impossible, there are viable solutions that pave the way to more effective sustainability measurement schemes. Promising pathways to which organizational scholars can make significant contributions include improving the governance of schemes to enhance transparency and balance power, using innovative data to more accurately and exhaustively feed these schemes, streamlining the numerous schemes to remove redundancy, and simplifying schemes to make them more robust.