Who Decides What to Measure? Social Entrepreneurs’ Ethical Decision-Making Dilemmas in the New Era of Mandatory Sustainability Reporting

Mandatory sustainability reporting is reshaping how organizations measure and communicate their impact, and its influence is no longer limited to large corporations. Emerging regulatory frameworks and standardized metrics are expected to trickle down into the world of social entrepreneurship, a field historically grounded in impact-driven values, context-specific outcomes, and normative commitments to inclusion, justice, and systemic change. In this commentary, we argue that the rise of mandatory sustainability reporting generates ethical dilemmas for social entrepreneurs as they navigate tensions between external reporting requirements and their normative commitments. We identify five interrelated ethical dilemmas related to ideology, identity, mission, resourcing, and collaboration, and examine how they unfold across four stages of ethical decision-making: moral awareness, moral judgment, moral intent, and moral behavior. In doing so, we offer a “thick conceptualization” of mandatory sustainability reporting as a moral issue that renders accountability decisions ethically consequential for social entrepreneurs and outline the resulting avenues for future research.