Search results

The objective of sustainability assurance (SA) is to give credibility to nonfinancial information (Cheng et al., 2015). In France, certain companies are subject by regulation to the implementation of SA in particular with the transposition of European Directive 2014/95/EU into national law. SA mission is a process by which an independent third-party organization (ITO) assures companies' nonfinancial information. Although this assignment is mostly performed by professional accountants, other providers can perform this assignment (Cohen and Simnett, 2015). In this research, the authors are interested in strategies for legitimizing the SA missions of independent third-party bodies. Assurance providers use their website to promote their missions. How do independent third-party bodies legitimize their assurance mission in a regulatory context relating to European Directive 2014/95/EU?

The authors carried out a discursive analysis of the promotion of SA missions on independent third-party body websites. A content analysis was performed on the collected textual data.

The results highlight different strategies for promoting the implementation of assurance missions aimed at legitimizing their new skills. Nevertheless, it appears that the providers make very little reference to the quality of nonfinancial information as the objective of SA missions.

The research made it possible to study the promotion of SA through the websites of ITOs. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to be able to question the ITOs to study their perceptions on their new SA missions.

The research enriches the literature on SA, particularly in a regulatory context relating to European Directive 2014/95/EU. It sheds light on the different strategies put in place by the providers appointed by regulations. From a managerial point of view, the study may allow ITOs to adapt their communication to promote extra-financial missions relating to the European Directive and thus to attract new clients. Finally at the institutional and regulatory level, this research highlights the need to put in place a precise framework relating to extra-financial assurance missions. This may also encourage countries not subject to the verification obligation to introduce such an obligation into their national law.

This is the first study to examine the promotion of SA practice by providers. In addition, very few studies have looked at this practice in a regulatory context and in particular within the framework of the European directive.

This paper aims to investigate how firms disclose the presentation and content of business model (BM) information in corporate reports to manage their legitimacy in response to European Directive 2014/95.

Legitimacy theory is used to identify disclosure strategies pursued by firms in reaction to the new regulation. To understand how firms adopt these strategic responses, semiotic analysis is applied to a sample of European companies’ reports through Crowther’s (2012) framework, which is based on a mechanism of binary oppositions.

Half of the sample strategically choose to comply with the European Union (EU) Directive regarding BM information through the use of non-accounting language, figures, and diagrams. Other firms did not disclose any substantive information but managed the impression of compliance with the regulation, while the remainder of the sample dismissed the regulation altogether.

This study demonstrates how organisations use the disclosure of BM information in their corporate reports to control their legitimacy. The results support the idea that firms can acquire legitimacy by complying with the law or giving the impression of compliance with the regulation. This study provides evidence on the first-time adoption of the EU Directive, and therefore, future research can enlarge the sample and conduct the analysis over a broader time frame.

A more precise indication of the EU Directive regarding “where” firms should report BM information, “how” the description of a BM should refer to the environmental, social, governance (ESG) factors, and a set of performance measures to track the evolution of a company’s BM overtime is needed.

While there has been a notable amount of research that has applied content analysis methodologies to investigate the thematic and syntactic aspects of BM disclosure in corporate reports, only a few studies have investigated BM disclosures in relation to the EU Directive. Furthermore, the application of semiotic analysis extends beyond traditional content analysis methodologies because it considers the structure of the story at many levels, thus developing a more complete textual picture of how BMs are described, allowing an analysis of the reasons behind the disclosure strategies pursued by firms.

This paper aims to analyze the determinants of the readability non-financial disclosure prepared under the Directive 2014/95/EU in the agrifood and beverage sector.

To reach this goal, an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model is proposed employing readability and governance variables. The sample is based on European agrifood and beverage listed firms that exceeding 500 employees and are considered public interest entities, including 744 firm-year-observations from 2017, first year after the Directive entered in force, to 2020, last year available.

The authors' results suggest the importance of corporate governance mechanisms as drivers in reaching more readability of non-financial information.

This study provides useful suggestions to policy makers and managers for a better understanding of the role played by some factors on non-financial information (NFI) readability. Moreover, findings may help regulators in confirming that the establishment of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) committee is a step in the right direction to strengthening firms' NFI readability. Lastly, this is beneficial for auditors and preparers who will pay more attention to the internal factors that can push for more (or less) understandability of NFI.

This research contributes to the academic and practical debate because it adds new insights into the literature on NFI readability and represents fertile area for future researches.

Motivated by the new European Union Directive 2014/95 on non-financial and diversity information, this paper aims to develop a future research agenda to conduct pragmatic, theory-oriented research into the Directive and corporate sustainability reporting.

Drawing upon the relational dynamics between states, firms and society in regulating non-financial reporting (NFR), this essay frames and analyses the Directive and its grand theories, as unproven theories, by discussing its practical concerns and reviewing the academic literature.

The Directive is an act of policy to legitimise NFR that encompasses two grand theories: improve the comparability of information and enhance corporate accountability. From a pluralist perspective, companies can rest assure that their compliance with the Directive will be perceived as socially desirable, proper and appropriate. However, some of the forces involved in translating the Directive into actionable policies operate contra to the Directive’s goals and, instead, act as barriers to its grand theories. In addressing these barriers, a research agenda is proposed that both traces backward to re-examine the foundational theories of the past and looks forward to explore alternative possibilities for achieving these goals.

This paper provides researchers with a practical-driven and theory-oriented agenda for future research in light of the rising academic interest in the Directive.

The barriers to the Directive’s grand theories help policymakers and practitioners to understand the practical concerns about the implementation of the Directive and other mandatory NFR policies.

This paper enriches the emerging debate on the Directive and highlights future possibilities for fruitful empirical research by developing a research agenda.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of the European Union (EU) Directive on the quality of sustainability reporting under the institutional theory lens. Specifically, the authors evaluate what kind of institutional pressure has the highest impact on the quality of corporate disclosure on sustainability issues.

The authors build a quality index based on the content analysis of sustainability information disclosed, before and after the transposition of the Directive, by Italian and Spanish companies belonging to different industries. The authors use an OLS regression model to analyse the effect of coercive, normative and mimetic forces on the quality of the sustainability reports.

The results highlight that normative and mimetic mechanisms positively affect the quality of sustainability reporting, whereas there is no evidence regarding coercive mechanisms, indicating that the new requirements do not provide a significant contribution to the development of better reporting practices, at least in the two analysed countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies assessing the quality of sustainability reporting through an analysis involving the period before and after the implementation of the EU Directive. It enriches the literature on institutional theory by analysing how the different dimensions of isomorphism affect the quality of information disclosed by companies according to the EU requirements. It contributes to a better understanding of the impact of the non-financial information Directive, and the results of this paper can be relevant for regulators, practitioners and academia, especially in view of the adoption of the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive proposal.

This paper investigates the quality and quantity of climate-related information disclosed by public interest entities (PIEs) in the non-financial disclosure scenario. Thus, this paper aims at drafting the state of the art on what is climate-related information disclosed by PIEs in the changing EU non-financial regulation assuming the Italian scenario and the industrial industry as significant in achieving the research aims.

The authors used the content analysis composing the sample of 34 large listed companies (i.e. PIEs) belonging to the industrial sector in Italy. The authors choose the Italian PIEs’ sustainability reports published in 2019 after the adoption of the EU directive and its guidelines. The authors adopted a coding and classification system, investigating the climate-related information through a systematic, objective and reliable method. The authors defined 99 indicators along the structure of the European Commission's guidelines and the indicator of disclosure, climate-related information indicator (CII). The framework mainly derives from the corporate disclosure theory and legitimacy and stakeholders' theories.

The results show the lack of several required climate-related information or a not in-depth presentation of information. Thus, findings are interesting in emphasizing that the current climate-related disclosure is at an early stage in complying with the European Commission's guidelines. Additionally, the findings enlarge previous theories on corporate disclosure, proposing new insights in the light of the recent interest in climate-related information.

Evidence contributes to extending the existing literature, drafting the state of the art of what is the quality and the quantity of the climate-related information in the corporate disclosure in the European scenario.

This paper is directed to propose the state of the climate-related disclosure following the EU directive guidelines, proposing some evidence to support the path toward the integrations of information by several parts (e.g. companies, regulators and so on).

The paper is a useful baseline for academics, practitioners, policy-makers and regulators in understanding actions to adopt in the climate-related disclosure and what could be the impact of forthcoming regulations in the field, also having some metrics (e.g. score value of disclosure, the indicator of climate-related information disclosure – CII).

This paper aims at investigating the quality of non-financial reporting (NFR) in light of Directive no. 2014/95/EU. Specifically, it focuses on the quality of NFR in Italian companies, as required by Legislative Decree no. 254/2016.

The method used to develop the analysis is mainly qualitative. A content analysis of 184 non-financial reports (NFRs) was conducted on a sample of 92 companies that have been previously involved in the process of NFR on a voluntary basis. Then, a longitudinal analysis was carried out to assess the quality of the NFR conducted from a voluntary to a mandatory basis.

This study shows that the quality of NFR does not increase when moving from a voluntary to a mandatory basis, especially for 25% of the companies that publish supplementary sustainability reports and/or plans. This result demonstrates that preparers may perceive mandatory NFR as a comprehensive best practice to adequately report their social, economic and environmental performance.

The contribution of this research is threefold. Firstly, it contributes to the social and environmental accounting literature that focuses on NFR quality assessment. Secondly, it contributes to the literature that emphasizes the role of mimetic, coercive and normative isomorphism mechanisms on accounting systems and reporting practices. Thirdly, it contributes to the research gaps for academics highlighted by previous literature on mandatory corporate reporting as a consequence of normative requirements and on the relationship between regulation and mimetic, coercive and normative isomorphic mechanisms within organizations.

This paper aims to document and discuss the involvement of a group of Spanish academics in the process of social and environmental reporting regulation to reflect on the role of accounting academics in regulatory processes.

The paper describes the long-standing engagement of a group of Spanish scholars in social and environmental reporting regulation, with a particular focus on the transposition of the EU Directive 2014/95/EU on non-financial information to the Spanish legislation.

Despite failures and mistakes in the engagement history of those scholars with different regulatory processes, academics problematized social and environmental reporting regulation, bridged the gap between regulation and practice, and facilitated the debate about social and environmental reporting. This long-term and collective engagement generated the intellectual capital that allowed researchers to provide their perspectives when the Spanish political process was ripe to move such regulation in a progressive direction.

The paper remarks two important aspects that, according to the reported experience, are required for academics to engage in social and environmental reporting regulation: developing long-standing research projects that enable the accumulation of intellectual capital to effectively intervene in regulatory processes when the opportunity arises; and nurturing epistemic communities seeking to promote corporate accountability was fundamental to circulate ideas and foster the connection between academics and policymakers. This long-term and collective perspective is at odds with current forms of research assessment.

Academics have a responsibility to intervene in regulatory processes to increase corporate transparency.

The experience reported is unique and the authors have first-hand information. It spans through two decades and extracts some conclusions that could feed further discussions about engagement and, hopefully, encourage scholars to develop significant research projects.