SUSTAINABILITY AND NON FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: A POSET’s APPROACH

In recent decades, sustainability has been at the centre of both academic and public debate with very strong repercussions, especially in the corporate sphere. The need to seek a balance between economic, environmental, and social dynamics in favour of concrete and lasting development is the basis of the reference literature. Furthermore, together with the purely economic and business aspects, it assumes the concept of well-being declined in various aspects. According to the American Management Association (2007), companies are increasingly inclined to adopt sustainability guidelines, focus on human well-being and respect for the environment, develop values and implement relevant policies and practices. The issue of corporate sustainability has grown significantly in the last 4 years also due to the obligation imposed by Directive 2014/95 / EU for large companies to disclose non-financial information. Despite the importance of this issue, the metrics to quantify and evaluate the phenomenon are many and unfortunately in most cases they are not suitable for addressing the topic in a timely, correct, and truthful manner. The various measurement attempts and the current lack of clarity that the aspects to be detected and assessed lead to a preliminary assessment of the company profiles in which to evaluate the fundamental aspects relating to the individual sections relating to sustainability present in the NFS: environmental, social, employees, respect for human rights, diversity, and the fight against corruption. After having deepened and analysed the reference literature and the different areas in which this phenomenon is declined, this work aims to outline the company's peculiarities in the light of the assessment of sustainability. The relevance of the subject has a counterpart of a methodological nature as the assessment of well-being involves the use of complex systems. This apparently second-order peculiarity has a significant impact on the evaluation process, because it questions the methodological paradigm with which this type of problem is usually faced, on the playing field of socioeconomics. As a result, they open new areas of research, both theoretical and applied. The dimensions of corporate sustainability were analysed through six systems of indicators. We reduce their complexity using synthesis obtained with the Partially ordered set. Results highlight the differences among the dimensions of sustainability. Considering what was published by Consob, in compliance with Legislative Decree no.254 of December 2016, the study analysed the 204 Italian companies that have compulsorily published the non-financial disclosures, as having at least 500 employees or at least 40 million in revenues. The results obtained show that the methodology used, and the indicator achieved were able to better grasp the multiple characteristics of the phenomenon, without ever underestimating the individual companies. Furthermore, it is evident that the methodology used has been able to better grasp the multiple characteristics of the phenomenon, without ever underestimating the company peculiarities relating to the topic analysed.