TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose Materiality, as a content-selection principle, is an emerging trend in sustainability reporting for making sustainability reports (SRs) more relevant for stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether materiality matters in the reporting practice of universities which have adopted the Global Reporting Initiative G4 Guidelines.Design/methodology/approach Strategic stakeholder theory and sociological institutionalism serve for deriving conflicting expectations about the compliance of universities with the materiality principle. In the empirical section of this paper, content analyses are conducted on the documented material aspects, followed by a correlation analysis for examining to which extent the identified material aspects are reported in the SRs.Findings Although universities document G4-19 stakeholder-material aspects according to different relevance levels and for internal and external stakeholder groups, the identified material aspects are not appropriately reported in the SRs. The adoption of the materiality principle is a superficial one and therefore more in line with the expectations of sociological institutionalism.Research limitations/implications The main limitation for this study is the small number of university SRs available. The chance to make SRs more relevant by focusing on stakeholder-material aspects is not used.Originality/value This paper reports the first study looking at the compliance between the documented material aspects and the content of SRs in a particular challenging organisational field, the university sector. This paper also adds to the emerging theoretical discussion about the extent universities implement materiality in SRs.
VL  - 31
IS  - 3
SN  - 1096-3367
DO  - 10.1108/JPBAFM-10-2018-0117
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBAFM-10-2018-0117
AU  - Lubinger Melanie
AU  - Frei Judith
AU  - Greiling Dorothea
PY  - 2019
Y1  - 2019/01/01
TI  - Assessing the materiality of university G4-sustainability reports
T2  - Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 364
EP  - 391
Y2  - 2024/04/20
ER  -