Current Trends and Future Research in Management Control for Sustainability in Retail

ABSTRACT The growing emphasis on sustainability in the retail sector, driven by regulatory frameworks, market trends and consumer demand, has placed management control at the forefront of facilitating sustainability practices. Despite increasing academic interest in this area, the literature is fragmented and provides limited sector‐specific insight into how management control systems are configured to support sustainability. This systematic literature review develops an integrated contingency‐informed framework that categorises types of management control for sustainability in retail. The framework illustrates how control systems can advance sustainability beyond mere compliance by linking different control types and configurations to retail‐specific contextual conditions and sustainability outcomes. By providing a structured synthesis of existing research and outlining future research directions, this study contributes to contingency‐based management control theory and offers insights for both academic research and managerial decision‐making.