Speakers
Federico Bertacchini, Fabio Demaria (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia)
Abstract:
The increasing emphasis on sustainability in corporate operations necessitates robust methodologies for assessing supply chain performance across economic, social, and environmental dimensions. This paper situates new sustainability metrics within the visual accounting tradition and explores a compact, testable model named FLAG (Form, Linkage, Aggregation, Governance), that explicates how design and methodological choices embedded new synthetic and relevant metrics become visual–material devices for attention, meaning-making and inter-organizational action. At the core of the FLAG framework is a multi-tier decomposition method that allows to extract latent structures iteratively, ensuring balanced contributions and preserving the hierarchical structure of the dataset. The proposed approach is applied to a dataset of 1,504 firms operating in the meat industry within the Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy.