Rethinking Corporate Decision-Making for Corporate Financial Sustainability: A Critical Literature Review and Future Research Agenda (Academic research)

Summary

• The review retrieved 152 records from the Web of Science and retained 110 records with complete metadata for synthesis.p.1
• The corpus clusters around five decision domains, including digital and AI-enabled decision support.p.1
• The initial Boolean search returned 342 records before filtering.p.3
• Sixty-eight of the appraised studies are set in a single country.p.10
• Financial sustainability is operationalised through at least five incommensurable metrics.p.10
• The review proposes an integrative framework in which corporate financial sustainability is the joint outcome of five interacting decision domains.p.11

Key insights

1. The literature is fragmented across disciplinary silos that define financial sustainability in mutually incompatible ways.p.2
2. Financial sustainability is used interchangeably with financial stability, health, resilience and viability across the corpus.p.2
3. Agency theory, behavioural finance and the resource-based view are the dominant theoretical lenses.p.11
4. The Altman Z-score family remains the most durable analytical tool in the field and needs periodic re-estimation and sector-specific calibration.p.6
5. Financial literacy is the most consistently documented antecedent of sound financial decision-making.p.7
6. Financial constraints and agency concerns jointly explain SMEs' recourse to crowdfunding.p.8
7. Longitudinal panel designs and multi-level models remain rare in the literature.p.10
8. A sustainability diagnosis based on a single ratio or index should be treated as a symptom rather than a cause.p.12