Accounting for Grand Challenges

Course Director: Emilia Cederberg

Companies play a critical role in the grand challenges society faces today. They also increasingly face pressure to meet stakeholders’ demands by contributing to solving these challenges. Accounting, reporting and control are vital in companies' response to these challenges and demands. Therefore, the purpose of this course is to provide students with measurement and accounting frameworks and techniques for analyzing and addressing the grand challenges faced by society and organizations. Given the centrality of metrics and quantification in how organizations address and communicate their sustainability practice, the course is relevant to accounting and non-accounting students alike.

The course takes a thematic approach and defines sustainability broadly, but places emphasis on the grand challenge of climate change. The course is structured around three core themes, all of which are examples of complex challenges that intersect with corporate practice, regulation, financing, and technical innovation. The three themes also offer ample ground for exploring the role of measurement/reporting tools, management control, and investment analysis. For the 2027 course, these themes are plastics, physical climate risk and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

The thematic approach, combined with guest lectures from both issue experts and corporate representatives enables the course to move beyond ‘sustainability 101’ and provide students with competitive sustainability knowledge ‘edge’. The course will give students deep insights into accounting frameworks and techniques to guide companies toward more sustainable value-creation processes. The course will enhance students’ ability to assess the power of accounting and management control techniques in sustainable transformations.

Format and Structure

The course is structured around three themes and is designed to link to practice strongly. By contextualizing accounting within some of society's significant challenges, the goal is to equip each student with the expertise to proficiently employ diverse

accounting frameworks and techniques for analyzing and addressing the grand challenges faced by specific companies. The course begins with an introductory lecture presenting the course and its practicalities. The three thematic modules follow the same structure. Each theme starts with a master class by an issue expert, e.g., a researcher. The master class sets the stage for the theme with foundational knowledge not typically provided in business education, and enables a definition of the core issue from a more neutral and scientific perspective. This is followed by guest lectures that illustrate the theme from a company or organization’s perspective, a case seminar, a literature seminar on the module readings, and a summary lecture.

Students are expected to have read the assigned course literature and completed any preparatory assignments to participate in classroom discussions actively, and to engage actively with the issue experts and corporate guest lecturers. As the course is focused on progression from basic (e.g. bachelor-level) sustainability courses, some fundamental knowledge of e.g., carbon accounting is expected. The course will provide video tutorials for repetition or explanation when relevant.

The second part of the course consists of a group project, where students describe and analyze a sustainability challenge that a company or organization faces. Access to a company or organization can sometimes be challenging, and students are encouraged to establish contact with a company/organization (study object) early on. The project is presented at a seminar, where the group will also act as discussants for another group’s project. Attendance on the group project seminar is mandatory for a grade on the group project.

Course Administrator: Christina.Ekelin@hhs.se

After the course, the student should be able to:

1. Systematically describe and analyze how accounting can be a force for change in solving society's Grand Challenges.
2. Systematically describe and analyze how accounting can impede solving society's Grand Challenges.
3. Systematically describe and analyze how Grand Challenges are valued by investors and the financial- and non-financial information used for these purposes.

General entry requirements

Lecture 1. Introduction to Grand Challenges

• Ferraro, F., Etzion, D. and Gehman, J., 2015. Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisited. Organization Studies, 36(3), pp.363-390.
• George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A. and Tihanyi, L., 2016. Understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6), pp.1880-1895.
• Feuls, M., Hernes, T., & Schultz, M. (2025). Putting distant futures into action: How actors sustain a course of action toward distant-future goals through path enactment. Academy of management journal, 68(2), 297-325.

Lecture 2. Climate Change as a Grand Challenge

• Cederberg, E., & Sjögren, E. (2025, February). Maintaining a measurement apparatus: the calibration of a robust internal measurement of public sustainability targets. In Accounting Forum (pp. 1-31). Routledge.
• Beusch, P., Frisk, J.E., Rosen, M. and Dilla, W., 2022. Management control for sustainability: Towards integrated systems. Management accounting research, 54, p.100777.
• Quattrone, P., 2022. Seeking transparency makes one blind: how to rethink disclosure, account for nature and make corporations sustainable. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 35(2), pp.547-566.
• Mikes, A. and Metzner, M., 2023. Lightening the carbon load: Using management control systems to manage decarbonization strategies. Journal of Management Accounting Research, 35(3), pp.121-151.

Lecture 3: Guest lecture: Johan Jacobsson, PwC

• No additional literature

Lecture 4: Guest lecture: Tobias Vernersson, Alfa Laval

• No additional literature

Lecture 5: Climate Change theme: Summary/Reflections

• No reading- but be ready to discuss and reflect on the climate theme.

Lecture 6. Social Inequality as a Grand Challenge

• Sikka, P., 2015. The hand of accounting and accountancy firms in deepening income and wealth inequalities and the economic crisis: Some evidence. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 30, pp.46-62.
• Skilling, P. and Tregidga, H., 2019. Accounting for the “working poor”: analysing the living wage debate in Aotearoa New Zealand. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 32(7), pp.2031-2061.
• Reinecke, J. and Donaghey, J., 2021. Political CSR at the coalface–The roles and contradictions of multinational corporations in developing workplace dialogue. Journal of Management Studies, 58(2), pp.457-486.
• Messner, M., Reuther, M., & Strömsten, T. (2026). Sustainability controls as technologies of actorhood: Constructing the responsible supplier in global supply chains. Forthcoming in Contemporary Accounting Research.

Lecture 7. Guest lecture: Torbjörn Westman, KPMG

• No additional literature

Lecture 8. Guest lecture: Klas Nilsson, Boliden

• No additional literature

Lecture 9. Social Inequalities theme: Summary/Reflections

• No reading- but be ready to discuss and reflect on the theme of social inequality.

Lecture 10. Valuing Grand Challenges

• Arjaliès, D.L. and Bansal, P., 2018. Beyond numbers: How investment managers accommodate societal issues in financial decisions. Organization Studies, 39(5-6), pp.691-719.
• Hansen, E.G. and Schaltegger, S., 2016. The sustainability balanced scorecard: A systematic review of architectures. Journal of Business Ethics, 133, pp.193-221.
• Muniesa, F., & Doganova, L. (2020). The time that money requires: Use of the future and critique of the present in financial valuation. Finance and society, 6(2), 95-113.
• Stroehle, J., Gümüsay, A. A., Edinger-Schons, L. M., Vogel, A., Ebrahim, A., Rasche, A., … & van den Terrell, E. (2026). A critical examination of corporate environmental and social impact measurement and valuation. Journal of Management Inquiry, 35(1), 3-18.

Lecture 11. Guest lecture: Elisabet Jamal Bergström, SEB

• No additional literature

Lecture 12. Guest lecture: Eliza Petrova, Deloitte

• No additional literature

Lecture 13. Valuing Grand Challenges theme: Summary/Reflections

• Henderson, R., 2023. Moral Firms? Dædalus, 152(1), pp.198-211.
• Kraus, K., Mikes, A., & Véliz, C. (2024). Bringing morality back in: Accounting as moral interlocutor in reflective equilibrium processes. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 113, 101570.

Lecture 14. Exam Preparation

• All course literature

Attendance at all lectures, guest lectures, and seminars is voluntary. However, students must submit and present a group assignment (for the case seminar) to earn 5 credits. Hence, active attendance is necessary to earn the 5 credits (three seminars).

After the three modules, a group assignment will be conducted. The Group assignment should contain empirical data collection and at least three interviews with relevant informants working for a company or organization. The Group Project should cover a sustainability topic, for example as presented in one of the three modules. Supervision is offered. The group project is presented at a seminar, where the group will also act as discussants for another project. Attendance at the project seminar is mandatory to get a grade on the project.

The course ends with an individual and closed-book exam worth 75 credits. Course grading thus depends on the Group assignments (hand-in and active seminar participation) (5%), the Group project (20%), and the written exam result (75%). Please note that while all course activities are formally voluntary, the content of all course

materials (including all guest lectures) is part of the course examination. The course is examined through:

• Group assignments (5%)
• Group project (20%)
• An individual written exam (75%)

The exam will be graded according to the standard grading scale of SSE. To pass the course, a student must achieve a minimum of a PASS on the group assignments and the individual written exam.

Find the course schedule in TimeEdit

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