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The purpose of this paper is to examine how legitimacy is gained, maintained or repaired through direct action with salient stakeholders and/or through external reporting, by using a number of empirical case vignettes within a single case study organisation.

The study investigates a foreign affiliate of a large multinational organisation involved in an environmentally sensitive industry. Data collection included semi-structured interviews with 26 participants, organisational reports and participation in the organisation’s annual environmental management seminar and a stakeholder engagement meeting.

Four vignettes featuring environmental issues illustrate the complexity of organisational responses. Issue visibility, stakeholder salience and stakeholder interconnectedness influence a company’s action to manage legitimacy. In the short-term, environmental issues which affected salient stakeholders resulted in swift and direct action to protect pragmatic legitimacy, but external reporting did not feature in legitimacy management efforts. Highly visible issues to the public, regulators and the media, however, resulted in direct action together with external reporting to manage wider stakeholder perceptions. External reporting was used superficially, along with a broad suite of communication strategies, to gain legitimacy in the long-term decision about the company’s future in New Zealand.

This paper outlines how episodic encounters to manage strategic legitimacy with salient stakeholders in the short-term are theoretically distinct, but nonetheless linked to continual efforts to maintain institutional legitimacy. Case vignettes highlight how pragmatic legitimacy via dispositional legitimacy can be managed with direct action in the short-term to influence a limited range of salient stakeholders. The way external reporting features in legitimacy management is limited, although this has predominantly been the focus of prior research. Only where an environmental incident damages legitimacy to a larger number of stakeholders is external reporting also used to buttress community support.

The concept of legitimacy is comprehensively applied, linking the strategic and institutional arms of legitimacy and illustrating how episodic actions are taken to manage legitimacy in the short-term with continual efforts to manage legitimacy in the long-term. Stakeholder salience and networks are brought in as novel theoretical extensions to provide a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between these key concepts with a unique case study.

This paper aims to investigate the current state of knowledge in key reporting aspects in relation to sustainability reporting in general and to reflect on their relevance to Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in particular. In doing so, the major gaps in that knowledge are identified, and the paper proceeds to suggest further research avenues.

The authors conduct a review of papers published in leading journals concerning sustainability reporting to analyse the progress in the literature regarding three important reporting topics: materiality, comparability and assurance.

The review conducted in this study shows that there is still work to be done to ensure high-quality and consistent sustainability reporting. Key takeaways from the review of the extant literature are as follows: there is ongoing debate about the nature of sustainability reporting materiality, and single versus double materiality. Clearer guidance and better contextualisation are seen as essential for comparability, and, as GRI suggests, there is an important link to materiality that needs to be considered. Finally, assurance has not been mandatory under the GRI, but the current development at EU level might lead to the GRI principles being incorporated in the primary assurance standards.

In this paper, the authors review and synthesise the previous literature on GRI reporting dealing with three key reporting aspects.

The authors extract some takeaways from the literature on materiality, comparability and assurance that will all be key challenges for GRI in the future.

This paper provides an updated review of the literature on GRI reporting dealing with three key reporting aspects.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sustainability reporting is shaped by the global influences and particular national context where businesses operate.

The paper uses both content analysis of published sustainability information and semi-structured interviews with corporate managers to explore how sustainability reporting is used to address unique social and environmental challenges in a developing country – Sri Lanka. The use of integrative social contracts theory in investigating sustainability reporting offers novel insights into understanding the drivers for sustainability reporting practices in this particular country.

The findings reveal that managers’ perceptions about usefulness of sustainability reporting, local contextual challenges and global norms influence the extent to which companies engage in sustainability reporting and the nature of sustainability information reported. In particular, Sri Lankan company managers strive to undertake sustainability projects that are beneficial not only to their companies but also to the development of the country. However, while company managers in Sri Lanka are keen to undertake sustainability reporting, they face different tensions/expectations between global expectations and local contextual factors when undertaking sustainability projects and reporting. This is also showcased in what is ultimately reported in company annual reports, where some aspects of sustainability, e.g. social, tend to focus more on addressing local concerns whereas other disclosures are on issues that may be relevant across many contexts.

Important insights for government and other regulatory authorities can be drawn from the findings of this study. By capitalising on the strong sense of moral duty felt by company managers, policymakers can involve the business sector more to mitigate the social and environmental issues prevalent in Sri Lanka. The findings can also be used by other developing countries to enable pathways to engage with the corporate sector to contribute to national development agendas through their sustainability initiatives and projects.

While the usual understanding of developing country’s company managers is that they try to follow global trends, in Sri Lanka, this research shows how managers are trying to align their responsibilities at a national level with global principles regarding sustainability reporting. Therefore, this paper highlights how both hypernorms and microsocial rules can interact to define how company managers undertake sustainability reporting in a developing country.

In a state capitalist country such as China, an important influence on company reporting is the government, which can influence company decision-making. The nature and impact of how the Chinese government uses its symbolic power to promote corporate environmental reporting (CER) have been under-studied, and therefore, this paper aims to address this gap in the literature by investigating the various strategies the Chinese government uses to influence CER and how political ideology plays a key role.

This study uses discourse analysis to examine the annual reports and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports from seven Chinese companies between 2007 and 2011. And the data analysis presented is informed by Bourdieu's conceptualisation of symbolic power.

The Chinese government, through exercising the symbolic power, manages to build consensus, so that the Chinese government's political ideology becomes the habitus which is deeply embedded in the companies' perception of practices. In China, the government dominates the field and owns the economic capital. In order to accumulate symbolic capital, companies must adhere to political ideology, which helps them maintain and improve their social position and ultimately reward them with more economic capital. The findings show that the CER provided by Chinese companies is a symbolic product of this process.

The paper provides contributions around the themes of symbolic power wielded by the government that influence not only state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but also firms in the private sector. This paper also provides an important contribution to understanding, in the context of a strong ideologically based political system (such as China), how political ideology influences companies' decision-making in the field of CER.

In this paper, we contribute to the theorizing of patient involvement in organizational improvement by exploring concepts of “learning from patients” as mechanisms of organizational change. Using the concept of metaphor as a theoretical bridge, we analyse interview data (n = 20) from participants in patient engagement activities from two case study organizations in Ontario, Canada. Inspired by classic organizational scholars, we ask “what is the organization that it might learn from patients?”

Patient involvement activities are used as part of quality improvement efforts in healthcare organizations worldwide. One fundamental assumption underpinning this activity is the notion that organizations must “learn from patients” in order to enact positive organizational change. Despite this emphasis on learning, there is a paucity of research that theorizes learning or connects concepts of learning to organizational change within the domain of patient involvement.

Through our analysis, we interpret a range of metaphors of the organization, including organizations as (1) power and politics, (2) systems and (3) narratives. Through these metaphors, we display a range of possibilities for interpreting how organizations might learn from patients and associated implications for organizational change.

This analysis has implications for how the framing of the organization matters for concepts of learning in patient engagement activities and how misalignments might stymie engagement efforts. We argue that the concept and commitment to “learning from patients” would be enriched by further engagement with the sociology of knowledge and critical concepts from theories of organizational learning.