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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 study aims to examine whether sport companies that promote gender equality through femvertising, an advertising trend that empowers women and confronts gender stereotypes, actually support women’s rights with institutionalized approaches to challenge gender issues. Some sport brands even have won awards for their femvertising efforts, however, not all of them have modified their policies and programs to support gender equality. Sport femvertising can be a new area for CSR-washing and this study investigated this potential.

Utilizing a content analysis, this study compared sport brands' (award-winning vs non-award-winning) level of engagement in internal and external CSR activities regarding gender equality. Sport brands’ CSR attempts and number of women in leadership positions were analyzed through companies’ CSR reports, annual reports and websites.

Only few differences between two groups (award-winning vs non-award-winning) of sport brands were observed regarding their gender equality CSR engagement. In some cases, non-award-winning sport brands had a greater percentage of women in leadership and practiced more internal gender equality CSR.

This paper provides valuable information about the potential of femvertising as an advertisement, as well as CSR strategy. Results of this study broaden our understanding of how sport companies embraced this advertising/CSR technique and the repercussions. Findings provide guidance for sport marketers who seek to improve their brand image through femvertising.

This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

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.

This paper focuses on image-to-text manuscript processing through Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), a Machine Learning (ML) approach enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). With HTR now achieving high levels of accuracy, we consider its potential impact on our near-future information environment and knowledge of the past.

In undertaking a more constructivist analysis, we identified gaps in the current literature through a Grounded Theory Method (GTM). This guided an iterative process of concept mapping through writing sprints in workshop settings. We identified, explored and confirmed themes through group discussion and a further interrogation of relevant literature, until reaching saturation.

Catalogued as part of our GTM, 120 published texts underpin this paper. We found that HTR facilitates accurate transcription and dataset cleaning, while facilitating access to a variety of historical material. HTR contributes to a virtuous cycle of dataset production and can inform the development of online cataloguing. However, current limitations include dependency on digitisation pipelines, potential archival history omission and entrenchment of bias. We also cite near-future HTR considerations. These include encouraging open access, integrating advanced AI processes and metadata extraction; legal and moral issues surrounding copyright and data ethics; crediting individuals’ transcription contributions and HTR’s environmental costs.

Our research produces a set of best practice recommendations for researchers, data providers and memory institutions, surrounding HTR use. This forms an initial, though not comprehensive, blueprint for directing future HTR research. In pursuing this, the narrative that HTR’s speed and efficiency will simply transform scholarship in archives is deconstructed.

Financial technologies form the heart of considerable disruptive innovation. Fintech is the emerging financial infrastructure for modern business. Big data are the feedstock for artificial intelligence (AI) that drives many fintech sectors – start-up finance, commodities and investment instrumentation, payment systems, currencies, exchange markets/trading platforms, market-failure response forensics, underwriting, syndication, risk assessment, advisory services, banking, financial intermediaries, transaction settlement, corporate disclosure, and decentralized finance. This chapter demonstrates how analyzing big data, largely processed through cloud computing, drives fintech innovations, scholarship, forensics, and public policy. Despite their apparent virtues, some fintech mechanisms can externalize various social costs: flawed designs, opacity/obscurity, social media (SM) influences, cyber(in)security, and other malfunctions. Fintech suffers regulatory lag, the delay following the introduction of novel fintechs and later assessment, development, and deployment of reliable regulatory mechanisms. Big data can improve fintech practices by balancing three key influences: (1) fintech incentives, (2) market failure forensics, and (3) developing balanced public policy resolutions to fintech challenges.

The purpose of this study is to examine how informational faultlines on a board affect the management of knowledge owned by directors and the consequences on organizational performance. In this study, informational faultlines are defined as hypothetical lines that divide a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the alignment of several informational attributes among board members.

The study uses unique hand-collected panel data covering 7,247 board members at 106 publicly traded firms to provide strong support for the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. The authors use a fixed effects approach and a system generalized method of moments approach to test the hypothesis.

The study finds that the relationship between informational faultlines on a board and organizational performance is U shaped, with the least optimal organizational performance experienced when boards have moderate informational faultlines. More specifically, informational faultlines within boards are negatively related to organizational performance across the weak-to-moderate range of informational faultlines and positively related to organizational performance across the moderate-to-strong range.

By explaining the mechanisms through which informational faultlines are related to organizational performance, the authors contribute to the literature in a number of ways. By conceptualizing how the management of knowledge plays an important role in the particular setting of corporate boards, the authors add not only to literature on knowledge management but also to the faultline and corporate governance literature.

This study offers a rationale for prior mixed findings by providing an alternative theoretical basis to explain the effect of informational faultlines within boards on organizational performance. To advance the field, the authors build on the concept of knowledge demonstrability to illuminate how informational faultlines affect the management of knowledge within boards, which will translate to organizational performance.

Environmental philosophies have guided cultures throughout history and continue to do so. This paper uses a framework of environmental philosophies drawn from history and the present, to analyse contemporary corporate environmental reporting. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of corporate reporting allows for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between corporate activities and nature, and in so doing demonstrates the moral practices of accounting for nature.

Three themes are extracted from a historical review of western environmental philosophy: dualism, transcendence and interconnectivity. These themes are applied to a sample of corporate environmental reports through discourse analysis, enabling the illustration of otherwise obscured moral characteristics of the corporate relationship with the natural environment.

This paper uses environmental philosophies to better understand some of the implicit messaging of corporate environmental reporting. Evidence of each of the three themes is found in a sample of environmental reports, predominantly dualism and interconnectivity.

Understanding that accounting is not just a technical, but also a social and moral practice expands the way the authors can interpret the outcomes of accounting. By presenting an exemplar of how accounting practice such as the corporate sustainability report can be analysed through a moral lens, this paper offers new insights intentioned to inform a more meaningful approach to environmental reporting.

A novel framework to explore the corporate sector’s relationship with the natural environment is presented. In light of current and predicted environmental changes, much of which has been attributed to the impact of corporate activities, the importance of a detailed explication of this relationship – such as the one proposed here – becomes imperative.

Recent debates in urban studies and urban anthropology have revolved around the growth of neoliberal economies and their impact on postcolonial cities such as Bengaluru and invoke the phenomenon of the death of the commons. Rather than focusing on a dialectical existence of infrastructures, which suggests a life and death binary, in 2020, I turned my attention to the possibility of a life between and beyond these two binaries through the game of football and its place in Bengaluru. This essay is based on a study of two different types of football fields in Koramangala, Bengaluru, and through this exercise, it intends to examine a potential move towards the viewing of commons as sites of knowledge production for sport, culture, and the city. One of the key ideas around which urban commons are looked at in this essay is through an examination of Bengaluru as a postcolonial city, one which was supposed to uphold a Nehruvian vision, and its transformation into the Information Technology hub of India through a neoliberal turn in urban development. A major concern raised here with neoliberal models of urban development is how people who do not have the monetary capacity to access sports infrastructure end up playing in the postcolonial, neoliberal city.