Research-Thesis: Barriers to the integration of non-financial dimensions in management control: the case of Walloon industrial companies.

Abstract

Sustainability has become a central concern for industrial firms, reinforced in Europe by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and its principle of double materiality. Yet a clear gap persists between what firms report and how they are run. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators have multiplied, but they rarely reach the management control systems that genuinely steer organisations, which were historically built around financial logic. This thesis examines that gap. Its central question asks what barriers limit the integration of ESG criteria into the management control systems of Walloon industrial firms, and how these barriers shape managerial decision-making.

The study combines a review of the literature on management control and sustainability with a qualitative, multiple-case study of four firms differing in size, ownership and sector. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, it reads each case against an analytical framework distinguishing four families of barriers, namely economic and financial, technical and methodological, organisational and cultural, and external and institutional, together with the factors that facilitate integration.

The findings show that integration is a matter of degree rather than presence or absence, and that the decisive boundary is investment appraisal. The four firms occupy distinct positions on this continuum. Crucially, the generic barriers do not operate independently but form a system whose force is governed by a few internal conditions, principally ownership and time horizon, organisational scale, and value-based leadership. Financial dominance is universal but softened by long-term ownership, measurement is necessary but not sufficient, and leadership anchored in values emerges as the decisive variable.

The thesis contributes by shifting attention from disclosure to internal steering, and by showing why firms facing an identical regulatory environment integrate sustainability so differently.