TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose Drawing on the phenomenological concepts of “empathy” and “communal emotions” developed by Edith Stein (1917, 1922), the purpose of this paper is to discuss the co-existence both of the legitimacy and accountability perspectives in voluntarily delivered social and environmental reporting (SER), based on different “levels of empathy” towards different stakeholders.Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts an interpretive research design, drawn from Stein’s concept of empathy by using a mixed-method approach. A manual content analysis was performed on 393 cooperative banks’ (CB) social and environmental reports from 2005 to 2013 in Italy, and 14 semi-structured interviews.Findings The results show that CBs voluntarily disclose information in different ways to different stakeholders. According to Stein, the phenomenological concept of empathy, and its understanding within institutions, allows us to interpret these multiple perspectives within a single social and environmental report. Therefore, when the process of acquiring knowledge in the CB–stakeholder relationship is complete and mentalised (level 3, re-enactive empathy), the SER holds high informative power, consistent with the accountability perspective; on the contrary, when this process is peripheral and perceptional (level 1, basic empathy), the SER tends to provide more self-assessment information, attempting to portray the bank in a positive light, which is consistent with the legitimacy perspective.Originality/value The concept of empathy introduced in this paper can assist in interpreting the interactions between an organisation and different stakeholders within the same social and environmental report. Moreover, the approach adopted in this paper considers different stakeholders simultaneously, thus responding to previous concerns regarding the lack of focus on multiple stakeholders.
VL  - 32
IS  - 1
SN  - 0951-3574
DO  - 10.1108/AAAJ-03-2014-1635
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-03-2014-1635
AU  - Costa Ericka
AU  - Pesci Caterina
AU  - Andreaus Michele
AU  - Taufer Emanuele
PY  - 2018
Y1  - 2018/01/01
TI  - Empathy, closeness, and distance in non-profit accountability
T2  - Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 224
EP  - 254
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -