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This paper aims to investigate whether organisations in developing economies legitimise their level of profit.

Organisations’ level of profit is evaluated against the readability of sections of information available in the corporate annual reports. These sections include the Chairman’s Report, the Chief Executive Officer Report and the Notes to the Accounts.

More profitable organisations report more readable information in their corporate annual reports. Information in the non-mandatory sections of the report (Notes to the Accounts) is more readable compared to the information in the mandatory sections of the report (Chairman’s Report). Larger organisations report more readable information. Public Enterprises report more readable information compared to the Publicly Listed Companies.

Organisations in the developing economies are aware of their role in their society. They respond to instances of possible violation of the implied social contract by sharing information in ways that relays news in certain ways.

Evidence of presence of legitimising activities by organisations would imply the need to strengthen the regulatory and monitoring guidelines to ensure efficient use of society’s resources and a fair rent charge for the utilities.

There is a greater need to monitor and question organisations’ level of earned profit to ensure it is necessary to maintain their operations.

This study is the first attempt to investigate organisations’ immediate legitimising activities in relation to their reported profit.

While the dynamic capabilities perspective is the most cited strategic theory in the information systems field of research, little effort has been made to review and integrate the associate literature of this perspective in the field. Accordingly, this paper aims to systematically analyze the information systems literature on dynamic capabilities and provide a holistic understanding of the topical composition and trend of dynamic capabilities studies in information systems research.

Using latent Dirichlet allocation as the text analysis algorithm, the author conducted a topic modeling of the dynamic capabilities corpus in the information systems field of research to quantitatively review, summarize and classify the prior literature. The review covered 191 articles published on dynamic capabilities between 1998 and 2018 in pioneering information systems journals and conference proceedings.

In accordance with the topic modeling results, the topical composition of the dynamic capabilities corpus in information systems research dominantly includes seven themes titled T1. Information systems value, T2. Information systems change, T3. Digitalization, T4. Information systems agility, T5. Big data, T6. Information systems innovation and T7. Information systems alignment. Also, the overall and topical trend of dynamic capabilities studies in the information systems field of research were revealed. The trends indicated that the investigated domain and its prominent sub-domains have generally had positive productivity over the past years.

The current study contributes to the domain by developing knowledge and improving literature on dynamic capabilities in information systems research, discovering the main topics of interest for information systems researchers to deploying the dynamic capabilities perspective in their studies, and prioritizing the future information systems research on dynamic capabilities based on the identified trends of topics.