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The purpose of this paper is to explore a possible framework for extinction accounting which builds on but also extends significantly the existing GRI guidelines relating to species identified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List as under threat of extinction.

The paper analyses disclosures relating to rhinoceros conservation and protection produced by top South African-listed companies in order to assess the current state of “extinction accounting”. Following this analysis, the authors explore and discuss a potential framework for extinction accounting which may be used by companies to demonstrate their accountability for species and disclose the ways in which they are working alone, and in partnerships, to prevent species extinction.

Corporate disclosures relating to rhinoceros may be interpreted as emancipatory. The authors identify several disclosure themes dealing with rhinoceros in integrated and sustainability reports of large South African companies and on their websites. Contrary to initial expectations, there is evidence to suggest corporate awareness of the importance of addressing the risk of this species becoming extinct.

The authors have relied on public corporate disclosures and would like to extend the work further to include interview data for a further paper.

An extinction accounting framework may be applied to corporate accounting and accountability for any species under threat of extinction. The framework may also be considered for use as a tool for institutional investors as well as NGO engagement and dialogue with stakeholder companies.

The rhinoceros has, from the analysis, significant cultural, heritage, eco-tourism and intrinsic value. Developing and implementing an emancipatory extinction accounting framework to prevent extinction will have a substantial social and environmental impact.

This is the first attempt to the knowledge to explore accounting for extinction and a possible extinction accounting framework. It is also the first attempt to investigate accounting and accountability for the rhinoceros.

The purpose of this paper is to show the impact that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have on the evolution of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). GRI is a sustainability report disclosed by business organizations to meet the demands and interests of various stakeholders. These stakeholders’ needs have influenced GRI and its guidelines.

The methodology for this paper is library-based archival research. It is qualitatively and analytically descriptive of prior academic research and published literature on the subject.

Sustainability accounting rulemaking has evolved overtime resulting in proliferation of reporting rules. These rules have improved the extent and scope of environmental and economic performances that businesses disclose in GRI.

GRI has provided the foundation for integrated reporting (IR). Both GRI and IR have ecological and functional dimensions. Sustainability is functionally inherent in the accounting principle of materiality, when disclosed in external reporting. The ongoing concern of business assumes an organization is systemic and operates as a living entity only when it can provide sustainable performance that benefits stakeholders and society.

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.

The study examines the social and environmental responsibility indicators disclosed by three International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) corporate mining members in their social and environmental reporting (SER) from 2006 to 2014. To achieve this aim, the author limits the data two years before (i.e. from 2006 to 2007) and six years after (i.e. from 2009 to 2014) the implementation of the Sustainable Development Framework in the mining sector in 2008.

Using the techniques of content analysis and interpretive textual analysis, this study examines 27 social and environmental responsibility reports published between 2006 and 2014 by three ICMM corporate mining members. The study develops a disclosure index based on the earlier work of Hackston and Milne (1996), together with other disclosure items suggested in the extant literature and considered appropriate for this work. The disclosure index for this study comprised six disclosure categories (“employee”, “environment”, “community involvement”, “energy”, “governance” and “general”). In each of the six disclosure categories, only 10 disclosure items were chosen and that results in 60 disclosure items.

A total of 830 out of a maximum of 1,620 social and environmental responsibility indicators, representing 51% (168 employees, 151 environmental, 145 community involvement, 128 energy, 127 governance and 111 general) were identified and examined in company SER. The study showed that the sample companies relied on multiple strategies for managing pragmatic legitimacy and moral legitimacy via disclosures. Such practices raise questions regarding company-specific disclosure policies and their possible links to the quality/quantity of their disclosures. The findings suggest that managers of mining companies may opt for “cherry-picking” and/or capitalise on events for reporting purposes as well as refocus on company-specific issues of priority in their disclosures. While such practices may appear appropriate and/or timely to meet stakeholders’ needs and interests, they may work against the development of comprehensive reports due to the multiple strategies adopted to manage pragmatic and moral legitimacy.

A limitation of this research is that the author relied on self-reported corporate disclosures, as opposed to verifying the activities associated with the claims by the sample mining companies.

The findings from this research will help future social and environmental accounting researchers to operationalise Suchman’s typology of legitimacy in other contexts.

With growing large-scale mining activity, potential social and environmental footprints are obviously far from being socially acceptable. Powerful and legitimacy-conferring stakeholders are likely to disapprove such mining activity and reconsider their support, which may threaten the survival of the mining company and also create a legitimacy threat for the whole mining industry.

This study innovates by focusing on Suchman’s (1995) typology of legitimacy framework to interpret SER in an industry characterised by potential social and environmental footprints – the mining industry.

This study aims to contribute to the existing literature by presenting new knowledge about sustainable development goals’ (SDGs) reporting practices through integrated reporting (IR). This paper’s ultimate goal is to dig to light companies’ main approaches to incorporating SDG disclosures into IRs.

This study puts forward both deductive content analysis and an inductive thematic analysis on a sample of worldwide leading IR adopters to assess what SDGs they disclose and how they integrate SDGs into the reports. Meaningful narratives and graphical illustrations are selected, categorised and discussed from a symbolic/substantive legitimacy perspective.

The results of this study highlighted that although a fair number of leading IR adopters addressed SDG issues, their pathways to disclosure were not uniform. In some cases, SDGs inspired substantive changes to internal management and process, communicated through an integrated approach. However, there was a persistent trend of using SDGs as camouflage and symbolic tool to enhance company’s reputation and obtain a licence to operate.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this was the first study that performed a deductive/inductive thematic analysis to engender insight into the most meaningful patterns followed by leading IR reporters worldwide to disclose their contributions to SDGs and address their legitimacy.

The purpose of this research is to provide an integrated approach of organizational ecology, population ecology and selection mechanisms within the context of the resource-based view of the firm, evolutionary economics (EC) and transaction cost economics (TCE). It applies this framework to examine the interrelationships between corporate social reporting (CSR) and global reporting initiative.

The methodology for this paper is library-based archival research. It is qualitative and analytically descriptive of prior academic research and published literature on the subject.

CSR has the potential to provide functional credence to corporate social and environmental activities by legitimizing institutionalized corporate norms and behavior.

Accounting scholars have recognized the need for an integrated approach in the social sciences to examine the multifaceted aspects of sustainability development and accounting. This research highlights that sustainability is related to ecosystems, environments, natural resources, demography, population, culture, political systems and history.

The purpose of this paper is to determine what types of sustainability activities companies are reporting and whether persons external to the companies understand how those reported activities correspond to the companies’ narratives about sustainability. That is to ascertain how people interpret the meaning of the activities included in the sustainability reports.

From a sample of sustainability reports prepared by Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines, the authors identified the distinct activities reported. The authors prepared a survey comprised of these activities and asked a sample of people knowledgeable about business and investing to evaluate each activity on the extent to which they are relevant to sustainability performance. The responses were then factor analyzed to identify the most important dimensions of sustainability these persons employed to relate the activities to sustainability.

The dimensions employed by the subjects differed in some significant ways from those dimensions used to construct the GRI format. Subjects evaluated sustainability efforts as primarily efforts of being a good citizen with sustainability an end in itself rather than as constraint to be respected in achieving profitability goals.

The study is a first attempt so results are preliminary, i.e. suggestive but not definitive. Though preliminary an intriguing implication is that closure on a sustainability reporting structure would be premature. More effort needs to be devoted to provide more clarity on the concept of corporate sustainability and what its implications are for corporate behavior.

Given the results that sustainability be regarded as a corporate end, what is the role of the corporation in society seems still to be disputatious. Sustainability may not be something achievable without changes in corporate law.

The study is an early attempt to assess the potential alternative narratives about corporate sustainability. Its value lies in providing insights into the age-old question of what should be the role of the corporation in a free society.

This study contributes to the literature on hypocrisy in corporate social responsibility by investigating how organizations adapt their nonfinancial disclosure after a social, environmental or governance scandal.

The present research employs content analysis of nonfinancial disclosures by 11 organizations during a 3-year timespan to investigate how they responded to major scandals in terms of social, environmental and sustainability reporting and a content analysis of independent counter accounts to detect the presence of views that contrast with the corporate disclosure and suggest hypocritical behaviors.

Four patterns in the adaptation of reporting – genuine, allusive, evasive, indifferent – emerge from information collected on scandals and socially responsible actions. The type of scandal and cultural factors can influence the response to a scandal, as environmental and social scandal can attract more scrutiny than financial scandals. Companies exposed to environmental and social scandals are more likely to disclose information about the scandal and receive more coverage by external parties in the form of counter accounts.

Using a theoretical framework based on legitimacy theory and organizational hypocrisy, the present research contributes to the investigation of the adaptation of reporting when a scandal occurs and during its aftermath.

Lately, sustainability issues are increasingly affecting all sectors, even if oil and gas industry is highly required to improve its social performance because of the societal pressure to environmental protection and social welfare. Sustainability concerns and corporate governance features and practices are more and more connected because sustainability has been perceived as a crucial topic by owners and managers. In this perspective, the empirical analysis aims to explore whether and to what extent, sustainability-oriented corporate governance model is linked with social performance.

By adopting a multi-theoretical framework that includes the legitimacy theory, the stakeholder theory and the resource-based view theory, this analysis used a sample of 42 large European-listed companies belonging to the oil and gas industry. The authors run fixed effects regression models by using a dependent variable, i.e. the social score, available in ASSET4 Thomson Reuters, and some independent variables focused on sustainable corporate governance models, stakeholder engagement, firm profitability, market value and corporate risk level.

Drawing upon the investigation of a moderating effect, findings display that stakeholder engagement is positively associated with corporate social performance and it can be considered an important internal driver able to shape a corporate culture and most likely to address corporate social responsibility issues.

This study confirms the need to develop an organizational and holistic approach to corporate governance practices by analyzing internal and external governance mechanisms. From the managerial perspective, managers should opt for a sustainable corporate governance model, as it is positively correlated with corporate social performance.

There is an urgent need to investigate sustainability issues and their potential association with firm internal mechanisms, particularly in the oil and gas industry. This paper can extend the current body of knowledge by pointing out a positive relationship between stakeholder engagement and firm social performance.

Non-financial reporting (NFR) is viewed as a major step towards organisational transparency and accountability. While the number of non-financial reports published every year has been growing exponentially over the last two decades, their quality and effectiveness in managing environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance have been questioned. Addressing these concerns, several jurisdictions, including EU Member States, introduced mandatory NFR regimes. However, the evidence on whether such regulation truly translates into enhanced ESG performance remains scarce. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the impact of the EU’s Directive 2014/95/EU (Non-financial Reporting Directive, NFRD) on the ESG scores of Polish companies.

Drawing upon institutional and strategic perspectives on legitimacy theory, the authors test the relationship between the introduction of the NFRD and the ESG scores derived from the Refinitiv database, using a sample of all those companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange whose disclosure allows for measuring ESG performance (yielding 171 firm-year observations from 43 companies).

This study’s findings show an improvement of ESG performance following the introduction of the NFRD. The difference-in-differences approach indicates that the improvement is larger for companies that are subject to the legislation when it comes to overall ESG performance, particularly for environmental and social performance. Nonetheless, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no significant effect is found for performance in the governance dimension.

This study investigates the role of transnational mandatory reporting regulation in the first years of its enactment. The evidence offers insights into the effects of disclosure legislation in the context of an underdeveloped institutional environment.