Conference Theme Track A: IS for Sustainability

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Paper Number

1688

Paper Type

short

Description

The global climate crisis makes the transition towards a sustainable society the central challenge of our time. Such a transition is only possible if the global economy engages substantial efforts to reduce its ecological footprint. While IS scholars agree that it is important to identify organizational change activities that support such a sustainable development, it remains challenging to capture firms’ sustainability in a quantitative, longitudinal way. In this paper, we describe the development of a text-based measure for firms’ sustainability that enables us to assess how IS affect firms’ sustainability in a longitudinal setting. Our approach uses machine-learning textual analysis to create a sustainability dictionary that we use to calculate a sustainability score based on 10-k filings and earnings calls for S&P 500 firms from 1994 to 2017. This score will allow us to better understand the sustainability implications of (green) IS.

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01-Sustainability

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Dec 12th, 12:00 AM

Measuring Sustainability through Textual Analysis

The global climate crisis makes the transition towards a sustainable society the central challenge of our time. Such a transition is only possible if the global economy engages substantial efforts to reduce its ecological footprint. While IS scholars agree that it is important to identify organizational change activities that support such a sustainable development, it remains challenging to capture firms’ sustainability in a quantitative, longitudinal way. In this paper, we describe the development of a text-based measure for firms’ sustainability that enables us to assess how IS affect firms’ sustainability in a longitudinal setting. Our approach uses machine-learning textual analysis to create a sustainability dictionary that we use to calculate a sustainability score based on 10-k filings and earnings calls for S&P 500 firms from 1994 to 2017. This score will allow us to better understand the sustainability implications of (green) IS.

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