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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the internal mechanisms employed by early adopters of integrated reporting in Australia to manage their reporting process and explores whether integrated reporting is stimulating innovative disclosure mechanisms.

The study was based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with organisations in varying stages of implementing integrated reporting. In total, 23 interviews were conducted with sustainability managers, finance managers and communications managers across 15 organisations. A content analysis of the interviews was undertaken using qualitative coding techniques.

While the organisations that are producing some form of integrated report are changing their processes and structures, or at least talking about it, their adoption of integrated reporting has not necessarily stimulated new innovations in disclosure mechanisms. This study did not uncover radical, transformative change to reporting processes, but rather incremental changes to processes and structures that previously supported sustainability reporting.

A major limitation of this research study was the small sample of organisations and stakeholders that participated, and the single-country focus. Finance, accounting and strategy people were particularly under-represented in this study, as well as external stakeholders, and the conclusions can only be tentative until further tested.

This paper sheds light on the practices of early adopters of integrated reporting, and their learning could inform other organisations considering an integrated reporting approach.

As an emerging phenomenon, there are few empirical studies exploring integrated reporting practices and this paper provides some insights into integrated reporting in Australia.

This paper aims to present a methodology to establish and integrate formal sustainability control systems (SCS) into management control systems (MCSs). The innovative approach aims at contributing to the need for SCS integration by permeating and transforming MCSs so that positive and negative externalities can be internalized into the financial performance measurement and reporting.

In an exploratory process, control systems were closely connected with financial accounting within four interrelated – ecologic, social, financial and knowledge-related – dimensions. Building on the action design research, multicriteria key performance indicators (KPI) for these dimensions were developed. Four value-based small and medium-sized enterprises of the food sector developed KPIs in interactive and participative workshops and interconnected their own business model with their sustainability principles. Constantly revising conformity, specific S.M.A.R.T. goals and related activities were defined, thereafter being used for KPI measures and for input in financial accounting.

The workshop series reveals the importance of including relevant stakeholders, multiple feedback loops and permanent dialogue to abolish cognitive barriers. The approach enables the development of multicriterial KPIs and identification of costs and benefits for an integrated financial accounting.

The paper contributes to practice and research in the field of SCS by providing insights into the process of an explorative workshop series developing multicriteria KPIs for controlling and financial accounting.

Information infrastructures can enable or constrain how companies pursue their visions of sustainability reporting and help address the urgent need to understand how corporate activity affects sustainability outcomes and how socio-ecological challenges affect corporate activity. The paper examines the relationship between sustainability reporting information infrastructures and sustainability reporting practice.

The paper mobilises a socio-technical perspective and the conception of infrastructure, the socio-technical arrangement of technical artifacts and social routines, to engage with a qualitative dataset comprised of interview and documentary evidence on the development and construction of sustainability reporting information.

The results detail how sustainability reporting information infrastructures are used by companies and depict the difficulties faced in generating reliable sustainability data. The findings illustrate the challenges and measures undertaken by entities to embed automation and integration, and to enhance sustainability data quality. The findings provide insight into how infrastructures constrain and support sustainability reporting practices.

The paper explains how infrastructures shape sustainability reporting practices, and how infrastructures are shaped by regulatory demands and costs. Companies have developed “uneven” infrastructures supporting legislative requirements, whilst infrastructures supporting non-legislative sustainability reporting remain underdeveloped. Consequently, infrastructures supporting specific legislation have developed along unitary pathways and are often poorly integrated with infrastructures supporting other sustainability reporting areas. Infrastructures developed around legislative requirements are not necessarily constrained by financial reporting norms and do not preclude specific sustainability reporting visions. On the contrary, due to regulation, infrastructure supporting disclosures that offer an “inside out” perspective on sustainability reporting is often comparatively well developed.

The paper aims to discuss the current development of sustainability accounting research, the identification of critical and managerial paths, and to assess of the future of sustainability accounting and reporting.

The paper is a review of recent literature in sustainability accounting.

Assessment of recent literature leads to the conclusion that both management decision making, through problem solving and scorekeeping, and a critical approach, through awareness raising, contribute to the development of sustainability accounting and reporting; however, the development of sustainability accounting and reporting should be orientated more towards improving management decision making.

The paper is a systematic review of recent research developments in sustainability accounting.

While sustainability-oriented education is increasingly placing importance on engaging students in inter- and transdisciplinary learning processes with societal actors and authentic challenges in the centre, little research attends to how and what students learn in such educational initiatives. This paper aims to address this by opening the “black box” of learning in a Challenge Lab curriculum with transformational sustainability ambitions.

Realist evaluation was used as an analytical frame that takes social context into account to unpack learning mechanisms and associated learning outcomes. A socio-cultural perspective on learning was adopted, and ethnographic methods, including interviews and observations, were used.

Three context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations were identified, capturing what students placed value and emphasis on when developing capabilities for leading sustainability transformations: engaging with complex “in-between” sustainability challenges in society with stakeholders across sectors and perspectives; navigating purposeful and transformative change via backcasting; and “whole-person” learning from the inside-out as an identity-shaping process, guided by personal values.

The findings of this paper can inform the design, development, evaluation and comparison of similar educational initiatives across institutions, while leaving room for contextual negotiation and adjustment.

This paper delineates and discusses important learning mechanisms and outcomes when students act as co-creators of knowledge in a sustainability-oriented educational initiative, working with authentic challenges together with societal actors.

The research aims to describe the foundation of healthcare organizations’ past and present sustainability endeavors; describe the direction of a health-care organizations’ sustainable development; reveal and characterize what determines the foundation and direction in a public health-care sector; and provide some insights into social marketing for sustainability endeavors.

Based on a semi-inductive approach, judgmental sampling was applied to select relevant health-care organizations. Informants were identified according to their knowledge of their organizations’ sustainability initiatives.

Offer insights into the foundation of sustainability endeavors and the direction of sustainable development for upstream social marketing in the studied public sector. The social marketing perspective is a common factor of relevance for the studied public hospitals.

The foundations of sustainability endeavors undertaken across the studied health-care organizations have not so far been homogenous. The direction of sustainable development has also varied across the studied public healthcare organizations and there is a need to move beyond individuals and shift from a micro to a macro/structural environment of sustainable development, so as to observe the effectiveness of any social marketing intervention.

This study highlights the importance of applying an upstream social marketing approach and programs, as part of a social marketing strategy, to promote and stimulate sustainable change in health-care organizations.

Contrary to the common sense predominating in many societies nowadays regarding sustainability endeavors and sustainable development, we conclude that neither the foundation of such endeavors nor the direction of sustainable development has progressed adequately in the studied public healthcare sector. As social marketing is intended to benefit society and foster social change, the macro level of intervention of the upstream approach clearly reveals its usefulness in the public health area.

Reveals two axes based on a social marketing approach. One is of micro and macro determinants characterizing the direction of sustainable development in a public sector. Another is of homogeneous and heterogeneous foundations of sustainability endeavors.

This paper aims to analyse how the components of the institutional context and the adoption patterns of business practices determine the approach to carbon reporting used by organisations.

Drawing on the New Institutional Sociology theory, this paper analyses, compares and interprets the results of the cases of four large Spanish companies which operate in different organisational fields and therefore they are subject to different institutional pressures. The results of these case studies illustrate the different approaches to carbon reporting used by organisations.

The theoretical proposal of this paper establishes that the components of the institutional context (regulative, normative and cognitive), along with the adoption pattern used by organisations to control their carbon emissions (substantive or symbolic), contribute to determining their approach to carbon reporting (outside-in, inside-out, twin-track and isolated).

The approaches to reporting and the adoption patterns have been considered independently in the previous literature, paying also scarce attention to the components of the institutional context that can have an influence on the approach to reporting used by organisations to share their environmental information. This paper contributes to bridge this gap, and its results can be of interest for supporting the decisions of policymakers, managers of organisations and society in general.

This paper aims to offer an overview of key aspects of the journey to develop the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Framework and Guidelines, focusing on the Materiality construct. It provides a practitioner’s perspective of several issues related to this construct.

This commentary is mainly based on publicly available technical documents, the analysis of papers related to the Materiality construct and a contextual review of the evolution of the main features of the GRI Guidelines and Standards.

This paper discusses the conundrum currently surrounding the Materiality construct and offers some reflections and suggestions about the challenges facing GRI.

Clarification of the Materiality construct could reduce confusion and eventually allow for clear identification and differentiation of the financial and sustainability accounting fields at their interface.

Language creates reality; an opportunity has arisen to bring appropriate and distinctive terminology to the sustainability reporting field, bridging the gap between competing logics.

This viewpoint is timely. It contributes a practitioner’s perspective to the current debate on the development of the Materiality construct.

This paper aims to explore the linkages between integrated reporting (IR) and organisations’ internal processes, specifically focusing on investigating the internal mechanisms of change that can lead organisations to adopt IR disclosure and how this impacts on integrated thinking internally.

The paper draws upon previous analysis and insights provided in the IR academic literature, as well as analysing several directives, policy and framework pronouncements. The study also draws on the management accounting change literature, using it as a lens to observe early adopters’ practice. In addition, it provides detailed case studies considering the internal processes of change in five early adopters of the integrated reporting framework (<IRF>) and whether the adoption leads to internal “integrated thinking”. Five Italian public sector organisations are analysed, and the authors make use of official documents, press releases and in-depth semi-structured interviews with the major internal actors.

The research highlights that the processes of change in organisations adopting IR is their adoption of a way of thinking, that is, integrated thinking, as a result of the process of internalisation.

Given the short history of IR, this sample is small due to the small number of early adopters.

The paper provides academics and policymakers with insights into the process of change to be considered while adopting the <IRF> and responds to calls in the IR literature for further field-based studies on IR’s impact on internal processes. Also, the paper highlights that the European Directive on the disclosure of non-financial and diversity information (2014/95/EU) has the potential to increase environmental, social and governance disclosures amongst European companies.

Current approaches to sustainability science and education focus on (assessing and addressing) the external world of ecosystems, wider socio-economic structures, technology and governance dynamics. A major shortcoming of such approaches is the neglect of inner dimensions and capacities (which constrains education for sustainability as an end), and a limited capacity to facilitate reflection on the cognitive and socio-emotional processes underpinning people’s learning, everyday life choices and decision-taking (which constrains education for sustainability as a means). More integral approaches and pedagogies are urgently needed. The purpose of this paper is to advance related knowledge.

This paper provides a reflexive case study of the development of an innovative course on “Sustainability and Inner Transformation” and associated interventions in the form of a practice lab and weekly councils.

The paper elaborates on the connections between sustainability and inner transformation in education, offers insights into the process of adapting contemplative interventions to sustainability education and concludes with some reflections on challenges, lessons learnt and future work needed to support more integral approaches. The findings show that inner dimensions and transformation can be a vehicle for critical, improved education for sustainability and how this can be achieved in practice.

It is only recently that the concept of the inner or personal (sphere of) transformation has received growing attention in sustainability science and education. Despite this interest, such new conceptualizations and heuristics have, to date, not been systematically connected to education for sustainability (neither as an end nor means). The paper presents a critical, reflexive case, which advances related knowledge. It sets a precedent, which other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from.