Search results

This study aims to propose a longitudinal analysis of motivations for Integrated Reporting (IR) adoption, internal changes, the benefits of IR implementation and compliance challenges.

The authors analyse a longitudinal case study of an Italian-listed company (Eni) participating in the IR-Pilot Programme (PP) and covering 10 years of IR adoption. The analysis was based on a mixed-method approach that included semi-structured interviews, content analysis of annual reports and triangulation with other data sources. Results are discussed regarding institutional theory, legitimacy theory and diffusion of innovation theory.

The study suggests that motivations for adopting IR change over time and participation in the IR-PP helps Eni acquire a comprehensive and substantial integrated view of value creation over time, makes integrated culture a key factor for strategic business sustainability and confirms the readiness of early adopters to comply with the non-financial Directive (NFD).

This study, among the few longitudinal case studies, provides organisations, regulators and academics with insights into the motivations driving the successful adoption and implementation of IR and the NFD. The results may help companies consider one of the tools currently deemed to bring sustainability into action and participation in pilot groups.

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.

The purpose of this paper was to study the direct impact of audit quality on environmental, social and governance (ESG) transparency. It aimed also to investigate the moderating effect of media coverage on the relationship between audit quality and ESG transparency in the USA.

The sample consisted of US companies listed in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Stock Index between 2010 and 2019. The Thomson Reuters database was used to collect ESG disclosure scores and governance information. The authors applied multiple panel data regressions.

The results showed that audit quality has a direct positive effect on ESG transparency. The findings also showed that the high exposure to public media by firms, the more they commit to high audit quality leading to disclose more transparent ESG information.

The results illustrated the significance of an external audit on an organization’s ESG report. Second, improving data quality has significant consequences not only for rating agencies but also for investors, businesses and researchers. These steps are required to increase the information content of ESG ratings.

The findings demonstrated that third-party external verification improves the dependability of nonfinancial reporting, hence bridging the confidence gap between corporations and the market regarding sustainability reporting.

Organizational technologies can be classified according to the roles they play as either commodity or strategic. Commodity technologies support common operations, while strategic technologies address perceived threats to competitiveness, often identified by strategic foresight. These must go through an adoption process before playing an effective role in strategy execution. The adoption process includes known activities, ranging from sourcing (itself from in-house development to turn-key acquisition) to operational integration. This paper aims to reveal strategic technology adoption risks that arise during strategy execution.

A gradually developed causal loop diagram model, supported by general literature, introduces three general classes of technology adoption risks: mismatched requirements, supplier dependence and unmanaged life cycles.

Rather than managed, these risks are incurred or avoided depending on decisions made during the adoption process.

Despite the scarce literature coverage for the approach, examples revealing the presence of adoption risks are nevertheless available in the well-documented history of enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Although ERP is presented as a general-purpose strategic technology, the unique business features of maritime container terminals pose serious challenges to its adoption, which provides additional support to the discussion and reinforces the conclusions.

The approach to identifying risks in strategic technology adoption departs from the current risk paradigm in two significant ways. First, it emphasizes policy decision-making rather than external events. Second, it views risks as systemic rather than occurring independently.

Organizations working in high-hazard environments contribute significantly to modern society and the economy, not only for the valuable resources they hold but also for the indispensable products and services they provide, such as power generation, transportation and defense weapons. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to develop a framework that outlines future research on systems safety and provides a better understanding of how organizations can effectively manage hazard events.

In this research, we developed the high hazard theory (HHT) and a theoretical framework based on the grounded theory method (GTM) and the integration of three established theoretical perspectives: normal accident theory (NAT), high reliability theory (HRT) and resilience engineering (RE) theory.

We focused on the temporal aspect of accidents to create a timeline showing the progression of hazard events and the factors contributing to safety and hazards in organizations. Given the limitations of the previous theories in providing a coherent explanation of hazard event escalation in high-hazard organizations (HHOs), we argue that the highlighted theories can be more complementary than contradictory regarding their standpoints on disasters and accident prevention.

A proper appreciation of the hazard nature of organizations can help reduce their susceptibility to failure, prevent outages and breakdowns of systems, identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance performance.

By developing HHT, we contribute to systems safety research by developing a new, refined theory and enrich the theoretical debate. We also expand the understanding of scholars and practitioners about the characteristics of organizations working in high-hazard environments.

This paper aims to analyze what Samarco and Brazilian magazines speak and say about Mariana’s environmental crime. Discover their doxa in this subject. Interpret the speakings, sayings and doxas through the theories of the treadmills of production, crime and law.

It is a qualitative and documental research and a narrative analysis. Regarding the documents: 45 were from public authorities, 14 from Samarco Mineração S.A. and 73 from Brazilian magazines. Theoretically, the authors resorted to Bourdieusian sociology (speaking, saying and doxa) and the treadmills of production, crime and law theories.

Samarco: speaking – mission statements; saying – detailed information and economic and financial concerns; doxa – assistance discourse. Brazilian magazines: speaking – external agents; saying – agreements; doxa – attribution, aggravations, historical facts, impacts and protests.

The absence of discussions that addressed this fatality, with its respective consequences, from an agenda that exposed and denounced how it exacerbated race, class and gender inequalities.

Regarding Mariana’s environmental crime: Samarco Mineração S.A. speaks and says through the treadmill of production theory and supports its doxa through the treadmill of crime theory, and Brazilian magazines speak and say through the treadmill of law theory and support their doxa through the treadmill of crime theory.

To provoke reflections on the relationship between the mining companies and the communities where they settle to develop their productive activities.

Concerning environmental crime in perspective, submit it to a theoretical interpretation based on sociological references, approach it in a debate linked to environmental criminology, and describe it through narratives exposed by the guilty company and by Brazilian magazines with high circulation.

This study investigates whether a firm that has experienced an environmental accident (EA) is less likely to conduct a product recall. If true, it would indicate that EAs tempt firms to hide operational problems that need to be revealed. The logic is that both events are operational failures that damage a firm's reputation and share price. Following an EA, a firm may avoid a discretionary product recall to avoid providing additional evidence of operational incapability and social irresponsibility and thereby triggering amplified reputational and market penalties.

The dataset is compiled from several public and private sources and includes 4,355 product recalls, 153 EAs and 120 firms from the industries that often recall products, including automotive, pharma, medical device, food and consumer products. The study timeframe is 2002–2013. Empirical models are evaluated using hazard modeling.

Results show that EAs reduce the probability of a product recall by 32%, on average. Effect sizes are larger when accidents are more frequent or more severe and when recalls are less severe. Through post hoc analyses, the study finds support for the proposed mechanism that firms avoid recalls due to reputational concerns, provides evidence that EAs can have a lengthy impact on recall behavior, and shows that firms are more likely to avoid recalls managed by the CPSC and NHTSA than recalls managed by the FDA.

Prior studies in operations management (OM) have not examined the impact of one negative event on another. This study finds that EAs tempt firms to hide operational problems that need to be revealed. While recalling fewer defective products is of concern to consumers and regulators, should EAs influence a broader set of discretionary operational decisions, such as closing/relocating a production facility, outsourcing production or conducting a layoff, study implications increase significantly.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the aspects of the organizational culture (OC) of companies operating in the Brazilian oil, gas and biofuels (O&G) sector based on semistructured interviews with managers of these organizations and its content analysis.

This research was conducted based on semistructured interviews with 12 managers of Brazilian O&G companies and analyzed with a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, namely, MAXQDA™.

The results make it possible to obtain the perception of managers about OC, generally understood as a set of attributes and variables of social order, supported by the historical–culturalist theoretical approach. Information about the explicit and implicit manifestation of culture, as well as the evaluation of the most appropriate research instruments and metrics, were also obtained after the interviews.

This study presents detailed results about OC and its characteristics in the perception of managers of the O&G companies that operate in the Brazilian market.

This paper aims to synthesize the corporate social responsibility decoupling (CSRD) literature, CSRD's causes and consequences and discuss other organizational attributes examined by CSRD scholars during 2010 and 2020. The authors provide suggestions for a future research agenda in this domain.

The authors' systematic literature review (SLR) uses the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework to extract CSRD studies. The authors filter collected articles against quality and relevancy criteria and finally review 175 published articles.

A theme analysis identifies and structures the many themes related to CSRD. The authors discuss the drivers of CSRD and reveal the consequences companies face after CSRD. The authors also provide a comprehensive CSRD discussion in the context of developed and developing economies. CSR communication is also identified as a tool for decoupling and recoupling.

The identified themes provide a thorough illustration of CSRD literature for new CSRD scholars. The authors also provide suggestions for future research, such as examining country-level policy-making and implications of CSRD variance and identifying cultural and economic hurdles to achieving core CSR purposes.

Policymakers and scholars may adopt the approach that CSRD is a misreporting of information similar to accounting fraud. This is particularly relevant given that an increasing number of CSRD scandals indicate that the purpose of bringing change through corporate CSR has not been adopted well by corporations.

The authors' study offers a comprehensive literature review for the period of 2010–2020. The studies identified are structured into meaningful themes which can provide groundwork for future researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to model a process for moving toward sustainable ecosystem service decisions in a Coastal Biodiversity and discuss the directions of the process for decision-makers to apply in ocean ecosystem services.

After the development of theoretical approaches to understand their prospects for the future development of ecosystem services, the authors worked on a process for developing factors for sustainable decision-making. It uses the Delphi method to develop all the factors supported by six dimensions in two specific moments: deductive-inductive and inductive-deductive.

This process of modeling the factors expands the possibility of adaptive governance to make prior and subsequent decisions using factors related to dimensions, stakeholders and benefits, risks, opportunities and costs.

Considering the limitations, future studies could use another database to widen the view in terms of the studies, factors, dimensions and other additional information to maintain the evolution of this process in ocean ecosystem services decision-making. Another limitation arose in the number of projects and experts defining the factors. This may prevent the opportunity to have more impact in terms of future decisions if more sources are used in the market. In addition, time and the access to experts during this modeling process demonstrate a limitation, as does the time for feedback.

This set of factors developed for adaptive governance decision-making can be applied to develop a prior alignment of stakeholder interests with sustainable practices.

This set of factors developed with the intervention of experts reinforces the importance of sustainable collective decisions on ocean ecosystem services. This is a joint approach with participants in the NextOcean project, sponsored by the European Commissions (EC)’s Horizon 2020 program. An Earth Observation-based Consortia aims to create sustainable value for Space, Land and Oceans.

This modeling process generated dimensions and factors to support adaptive governance stakeholders in making sustainable decisions in a coastal biodiversity zone.