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This paper investigates how organisations are responding to mandatory modern slavery disclosure legislation. Experimentalist governance suggests that organisations faced with disclosure requirements such as those contained in the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 will compete with one another, and in doing so, improve compliance. The authors seek to understand whether this is the case.

This study is set in the UK public sector. The authors conduct interviews with over 25% of UK universities that are within the scope of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 and examine their reporting and disclosure under that legislation.

The authors find that, contrary to the logic of experimentalist governance, universities' disclosures as reflected in their modern slavery statements are persistently poor on detail, lack variation and have led to little meaningful action to tackle modern slavery. They show that this is due to a herding effect that results in universities responding as a sector rather than independently; a built-in incapacity to effectively manage supply chains; and insufficient attention to the issue at the board level. The authors also identity important boundary conditions of experimentalist governance.

The generalisability of the authors’ findings is restricted to the public sector.

In contexts where disclosure under the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 is not a core offering of the sector, and where competition is limited, there is little incentive to engage in a “race to the top” in terms of disclosure. As such, pro-forma compliance prevails and the effectiveness of disclosure as a tool to drive change in supply chains to safeguard workers is relatively ineffective. Instead, organisations must develop better knowledge of their supply chains and executives and a more critical eye for modern slavery to be combatted effectively. Accountants and their systems and skills can facilitate this development.

This is the first investigation of the organisational processes and activities which underpin disclosures related to modern slavery disclosure legislation. This paper contributes to the accounting and disclosure modern slavery literature by investigating public sector organisations' processes, activities and responses to mandatory reporting legislation on modern slavery.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The purpose of this study is to analyze the simultaneous effect of the regulation (non-financial information (NFI)- 254/2016) and the factors driving in (no)environmental disclosure (ED) and the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG) of Italian companies.

The study is supported by the theory of legitimacy. The level of ED regarding GHG was measured for 125 Italian companies in 2018, the companies were selected from Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa di Itália, because those included in the list of companies in the Dichiarazione Non Finanziaria all date back to December 31, 2019. Using a scoring system and content analysis of their annual reports, through 20 criteria supported by the literature. The study explores variables of the current legislation, the effect of disclosure and no disclosure, and the influence of the shareholding structure, managerial shareholding, economic power and industry classification at the ED level. The analyses were carried out using structural equation modeling because the authors seek to understand the cause-effect relationship between aspects of legitimacy with dissemination on GHG emissions.

This study finds that NFI.

The study is limited to understanding the effect of legislation on the level of mandatory disclosure in non-financial reports, and the Paris Agreement (voluntary) disclosure on GHG, so the choice of companies analyzed and the study variables are limited to companies that are required to publish non-financial reports, and the variables considered in the study take into account normative aspects and voluntary guidelines of the Paris Agreement. As implications, the results show that adherence to the Paris Agreement contributes more to the quality and comprehensiveness of the information than adherence to the European and Italian legislation (mandatory), which reinforces the understanding that even if the legislation has advanced, it is still soft regarding the quality of information on companies' practices regarding the reduction of GHG emissions.

The findings suggest that non-financial reports are being adopted by listed Italian companies, however, there is variation in the scope of the reports, especially on GHG. For companies listed in Italy, non-financial reports comply with Italian Legislative Decree 254/2016 (mandatory), however, the quality of information on GHG is improved when companies' reports have greater adherence to the Paris Agreement (voluntary).

The results can encourage companies listed in Italy to incorporate NFI in annual reports based on the Paris Agreement, the global pact to reduce GHG emissions, thus building confidence in the capital market and society in general.

The findings contribute to the literature on non-financial reporting, the level of compliance with legal basis and international best practices, such as the Paris Agreement, providing empirical analyzes of non-financial disclosures in publicly available reports in Italy.

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.

Legislative encouragement to promote collective bargaining by the use of the indirect method of the sanction of incorporation through a CAC award.

This paper examines risk information disclosed by UK public companies within their annual reports. The types of risk information disclosed are analyzed and the authors examine whether a relationship exists between company size or level of risk and risk disclosure totals.

No prior empirical studies of the risk information content of annual reports have been undertaken. To analyze the risk disclosures, a sentence‐based approach was used.

Overall the results indicate that the companies sampled are not providing a complete picture of the risks they face. There is minimal disclosure of quantified risk information and a significant proportion of risk disclosures consist of generalized statements of risk policy. More usefully directors are releasing forward‐looking risk information. The principal driver affecting levels of risk disclosure is company size and not company risk level.

Further risk disclosure research is possible in many different areas. Cross‐country studies could be undertaken as could risk disclosure studies within specific industry sectors. A limitation of the sentence‐based methodology is that it does not measure the quality of the risk disclosures and therefore different methods may be adopted in future studies.

Professional bodies attempting to improve risk reporting have not convinced directors of the benefits associated with greater voluntary risk disclosure. In the UK this has led to a mandatory requirement to provide better risk information being forced upon companies through legislation enacted by the UK government.

The area this paper researches is of particular importance given recent accounting scandals that have occurred. No previous risk disclosure studies have been published, therefore this exploration is also valuable in linking risk management and transparency.

Communicating with employees is an aspect of management which is today being subjected to new pressures and ideas. Trade unions have new disclosure rights. A growing number of managers believe that employees have a right to know about company matters, or see employee communications as an essential adjunct to involving employees in managerial decisions through consultation or participation.

The study analyses de jure disclosure harmony between Australia and Singapore by examining selected disclosure requirements from the statutes, stock exchange listing rules and five accounting standards. Empirical evidence as to Australian and Singaporean companies' de facto disclosure is provided. Two disclosure indices, specifically the no‐violation‐for‐non‐disclosure (NVND) index and the violation‐for‐non‐disclosure (VND), were used to assess the extent of company's disclosure of the selected requirements contained within their respective country's rules.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

Time as a dependent (temporal patterning or allocation) or independent (temporal context) variable in the study of marketing problems has attracted a range of researchers who use a variety of paradigms. Common to the majority of approaches is the notion of an abstract, absolute, linear, irreversible, monotonic, homogeneous and divisible structure of time, into which consumer behaviour is set. In particular, current consumer models pay little attention to the phenomenological experience of both time and temporality. The perceived and experienced duration over which events can occur draws attention to notions of time beyond normal temporal horizons. This is illustrated through the example of certain financial service products where the expansion of everyday time horizons is required to understand the total consumption act. It is proposed that an understanding of the consumption act requires an insight into the consumer′s own temporality and that embedded in the product or service being consumed. Further, there needs to be harmony between these temporalities to optimise the utility to be gained from the transaction.