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This study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese and Western corporate values in one story.

We use an analytical framework drawing on insights borrowed from narratology and the notion of wrapping – the traditional art of packaging as communication.

We find that Mitsubishi is a survivor company that uses different corporate reporting frameworks during its reporting journey to construct a bespoke narrative of its value creation and cultural values. It emplots narratives to convey a story presenting the impression that Mitsubishi is a Japanese corporation but is compatible with Western neo-liberal ideology, making bad news palatable to its stakeholders and instilling confidence in the future.

Wrapping is a culturally sensitive form of impression management used in the integration of corporate reporting. Therefore, rather than assuming that companies blatantly manipulate their image in corporate reports, we suggest that future research should focus on how narratives are constructed and made sense of, situating them in the context of local culture and traditions.

The findings should interest scholars, report preparers, policymakers, and the IFRS, considering the recent release of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards designed to reduce the so-called alphabet soup of corporate reporting. By following Mitsubishi’s journey, we learn how and why the notion of integrated reporting was adopted and integrated with other reporting frameworks to create narratives that together convey a story of a global corporation compliant with Western neoliberal ideology. It highlights how Mitsubishi used integrated reporting to tell its story rather than as a rigid reporting framework, and the same fate may apply to the new IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards that now include integrated reporting.

The study offers a new perspective on corporate reporting, showing how the local societal discourses of cultural heritage and modernity can shape the journey of the integration of corporate reporting over time.

This research explores how contextual elements and significant events influence the changing storylines within a company's directors' reports spanning a period of six decades. These elements and events encompass the internal dynamics of the family that owns the company, industry-specific advancements, political and socioeconomic climates, and explicit guidelines related to corporate reporting.

This research employs a case study methodology to analyse the directors' reports of Barilla, a prominent Italian food manufacturer, within the theoretical framework of historical institutionalism. A systematic content analysis is conducted on sixty directors' reports published between 1961 and 2021. The study also identifies and examines significant contextual events within this six-decade period, which are linked to four key institutional factors.

Based on the research findings, the directors' reports exhibited notable fluctuations throughout the studied timeframe in reaction to shifts in the institutional setting. Our investigation highlights that each institutional element experienced crucial pivotal moments, and given their interconnected nature, modifications in one factor impacted the others. It was noted that these pivotal moments resulted in alterations in the directors' reports' content across various thematic areas. Additionally, despite Barilla being a multinational company, it was found that national events within Italy had a more pronounced influence on the evolving narratives than global events.

Previous research on directors' reports or chairman's statements has primarily focused on the influence of macro-level institutional factors on the narratives. In contrast, our study considers both macro-level and micro-level institutions, specifically examining the internal events within a family business and how they shape the content of directors' reports. Our study is also distinctive in its analysis of specific critical junctures and their interactions with the investigated institutional factors. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, few existing studies span a timeframe of sixty years, particularly concerning an Italian company.

The study aims to determine whether a relationship exists between the potential significance of corporate controversies for stakeholders and how organisations respond to them in their annual and sustainability reports.

This paper employs content analysis on annual and sustainability reports of 48 listed companies from the Refinitiv database. The logit regression was used to estimate the model.

The study revealed that the main factors increasing the probability of a controversial issue being addressed in a corporate report are the controversy’s potential significance, companies’ financial performance and lawsuits.

Our study has three major limitations. These are a relatively small sample of companies and reports, focusing on disclosures made in corporate reports and omitting other channels of communication, for example, social media, and a certain amount of subjectivity in the process of coding information.

Former studies show that corporations face a serious risk of their hypocritical strategies becoming too evident for stakeholder groups. Our findings suggest that the risk is already materialising and may undermine the idea of CSR and sustainability reporting.

Our research focuses on high-profile adverse incidents widely reported in the media, the omission of which from corporate reports seems to constitute a particular case of organised hypocrite. It also demonstrates that companies use an impression management strategy to defuse adverse publicity and that major controversies cause minor ones to be omitted from their reports.

Despite the rising trend of sustainable developmental goals (SDGs) incorporation into sustainability reporting, there remains a gap in understanding the role of SDG disclosure (SDGD) in the relationship between sustainability and financial performance. Thus, this study aims to investigate the relationship between sustainability performance and the level of SDGD; the relationship between sustainability performance and financial performance; and the link between the level of SDGD and financial performance.

Conducted in Italy, the analysis involves manual collection of sustainability reports from company websites for the fiscal years from 2019 to 2022, followed by textual analysis to identify SDG-related content disclosed in nonfinancial reports. Financial and nonfinancial data from Orbis and LSEG databases are used for regression analysis on panel data.

Findings align with existing literature, emphasizing the partial mediator role played by the level of SDGD in the relationship between sustainability performance and financial performance, measured by return on equity. In addition, the study suggests that there is a positive relationship between sustainability performance and the level of SDGD and a positive relationship between the level of SDGD and financial performance.

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how SDG disclosures function within the broader nexus of sustainability performance and financial outcomes. Findings from this study provide empirical support for the argument that SDGD is not merely a regulatory compliance tool but also a strategic asset that can enhance a firm’s financial performance.

This paper expands on existing analyses of corporate energy and sustainability communication and shows the potential of evolutionary theory to study and conceptualize sustainable corporate communication as niche construction and its transformative and transformational potential.

With a qualitative content analysis of non-financial reporting of energy corporations and a deep dive into one selected case (Yin, 2013) with a two-step categorization of the sustainability related text and (n = 5) expert interviews (QCAmap, Mayring, 2019; Fenzl and Mayring, 2017), the paper reflects on alterations within the organization and in the organization–stakeholder relationships through corporate sustainability communication.

The analytical deep dive into one case of corporate sustainability communication of a multinational energy corporation shows the difference between a transformative and transformational character of corporate communication. The insights from the interviews support the assumption that corporates not only adapt to changes of environmental factors (perturbative communication) but also – however rarely – alter their spatiotemporal relationships with their external environment (relocational communication), so there is a lack of actual transformational communication.

Corporates in the (renewable) energy sector as well as industry networks like gas (infrastructure) suppliers have the potential to impact their environment (stakeholder, energy communities, etc.), change cultural patterns and norms and co-construct new socio-ecological niches through communication. The study presented gives evidence and examples for transformative corporate sustainability communication. On a conceptual level, it offers an innovative framework to understand sustainability as a guiding principle for corporate communication that will stimulate corporate communication research in the future.

The effects of integrated reporting quality (IRQ) have been debated in increasing empirical studies. Several IRQ measures, different theoretical approaches and multiple contexts have been adopted and investigated, leading to mixed results. By using the meta-analytic technique, this study aims to contribute to the accounting literature, reconciling the conflicting results on the effects of IRQ and providing objective conclusions to complement narrative literature reviews.

A sample of 45 empirical papers from 2013 to 2022, with 653 effect sizes, was used to assess the effects associated with IRQ. The papers were clustered into five groups (market reaction, financial performance, cost of capital, financial analysts’ properties and managerial decisions) based on the different consequences of IRQ investigated in the primary studies. A random-effects meta-regression model was used to explore all sources of heterogeneity together.

The meta-regression results confirm that IRQ positively influences firms’ market valuation and financial performance and hampers opportunistic managerial behaviour by improving corporate transparency, mitigating information asymmetry and encouraging accountability. Moreover, differences in the study characteristics affect the strength of the relationship object of interest.

Through meta-analysis, this study provides a broader overview of the effects of IRQ by enhancing the generalisability of the findings. The results also pave the way for additional evidence on the outcome variables affected by the quality of integrated disclosure.

In countries where disclosing and reporting matters on sustainability are optional, what are the drivers promoting voluntarily disclosing information related to social responsibility and environmental sustainability corporate environmental and social responsibility? Exploring drivers promoting the demand for voluntarily disclosing information related to social responsibility and environmental sustainability in Saudi Arabia, where regulatory and professional bodies have not mandated information on corporate environmental and social responsibility, motivates this study.

A total of 48 individuals voluntarily participated in the survey.

Findings reveal that creating a better social, ethical and mental image, building a public relations image for the company, improving stakeholder trust in the company, signaling to investors the company’s care for the earth to meet the ethical motivation of stakeholders, enhancing corporate social responsibility awareness and exhibiting surpasses the mere generation of profits, all derive such disclosure. Such disclosure also signifies the firm’s value as well as improves the overall firm’s economic performance.

Regulatory and professional bodies must issue and adopt reporting models for entities, principally private companies, whether publicly traded or not, of the content. Their reports should aim to inform users and stakeholders about fulfilling the social and environmental responsibilities of entities toward society and its members.

Out of the drivers for the demand, perceptions of elders toward meeting ethical motivation of senior management significantly differ from that of younger.

Few studies have been attempted on drivers of the demand for reporting environmental sustainability and social responsibility in an environment where such reporting is not mandated. This study offers insight from Saudi Arabian corporate reports.

Based on the comprehensive definition of accounting of Carnegie et al. (2021a, 2021b), this study examines how visual imagery can expand and enhance accountability to stakeholders and create room for more human-centric accounts. This study aims to understand how this use can elucidate and prompt interpretations of rhetorical features aimed at envisioning legitimacy and being perceived as accountable.

Following a methodological interpretative approach, this paper draws on a qualitative case study based on a Portuguese charity, the Santa Casa da Misericordia do Porto, from 2019 to 2021, including the COVID-19 crisis period, analysing visual rhetoric in annual and sustainability reports.

The study illuminates how the visual images interact and evoke shared cultural understandings, shaping meanings that can symbolically foster organisational legitimacy and envisions accountability. These symbolic and emotive elements capture and make visible social impacts and reflect broader societal concerns.

The study of visual images within the accounting context can enrich the understanding of accounting as a technical, social and moral practice, while expanding the scope of accountability and promoting a more human-centred approach to accounting. It also adds to the literature on the persuasiveness and rhetoric of accounting and reporting visualisations and on charities’ accountability in crisis period.

Since the withdrawal of IFRIC 3 in 2005, there has been a regulatory freeze in accounting for emission rights that contrasts with the international momentum of climate-related financial disclosures. This paper explores how different narratives and institutional dynamics explain the failure to produce guidance on accounting for emission rights.

This paper mobilises the notion of field-configuring events to examine a sequence of six events between 2003 and 2016, including four public consultations and two dialogues between standard setters. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of documents produced in this space that investigates how different practices and narratives configured the field's positions, agenda, and meaning systems.

Accounting for emission rights was gradually decoupled from climate change and carbon markets, relegated to the research pipeline, and forgotten. The obstacles that the IASB and EFRAG found in presenting themselves as central in the recurring events, the excess of representations, and the increasingly technical and abstract debates eroded the 2003 momentum for regulation, making the different initiatives to revitalise the project vulnerable and open to scrutiny. Lukes (2021) refers to nondecision-making to express that some issues are suffocated before they are expressed.

The regulation of accounting for emission rights, an area that has received scant attention in the literature, provides some insights into the different narrative mechanisms that, materialising in specific times and spaces, draw regulatory attention to particular accounting issues, which are problematised and, eventually, forgotten. This study also illustrates that identifying interests is problematic as actors shift from alternative positions over a long period. The case examined also raises some doubts about the previous effectiveness of international standard setters in dealing with matters of connectivity between the environment and finance, as is the case for accounting for emissions rights.

This study aims to understand why some social and environmental reporting (SER) regulations are more successful than others in modifying collective corporate reporting behaviour and expectations. More specifically, it presents a qualitative and historically informed exploration of the construction of the enabling conditions for corporate adoption of SER regulation in a national context.

Drawing on insights from structuration theory and the sociological approach to legal studies, the authors examined the normative persuasion of the first regulation in Spain requiring firms to disclose social and environmental information in a stand-alone report: Article 39 of the Spanish Sustainable Economy Law. The case study is based primarily on 38 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors involved in this SER regulation from 2008 to 2014. Other sources such as legal and policy documents, historical documents, books, press reports and field notes from attendance at technical meetings related to the phenomenon under study help inform and complement the analysis of the interviews.

The analysis reveals that the agency of regulators, regulatees and other relevant actors involved in the SER regulation led to the law becoming a dead letter. However, only by examining the structural circumstances, shaped by history and socio-economic context, can the authors understand how the normative persuasion of law is constructed or undermined.

The study underscores the importance of the national context in developing corporate social responsibility (CSR) regulation and the crucial role of history. The results of this research also suggest that significant progress towards a more transformative CSR regulation cannot be achieved without the support of enabling structures/

Recent SER regulations (European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and IFRS sustainability standards, to mention those that are gaining most traction) may not achieve sufficient compliance if those responsible for drafting them do not ensure that the conditions for the emergence of regulatory persuasion are met. Regulators must therefore have a profound understanding of how these conditions are constructed as part of a historical process inextricably linked to the social structures of the environment in which the law is to be applied.

The study reveals the changing landscape of corporate social responsibility, where scientists, academics, NGO activists and civil society organisations struggle to gain some agency in a field populated by actors, such as trade unions or employers, who were constitutive of Western industrial liberal democracies.

This study presents an in-depth and historically grounded analysis of the dynamics involved in creating the conditions that lead to successful SER legislation in a national context.