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This article presents a hands-on example of how the Sydney Conservatorium of Music developed a new strategy to create public value in the lead up to its centenary celebrations in 2015.

Traditional research methods, such as semi-structured interviews (Qu & Dumay, 2011), alongside a strategic workshop incorporating a group discussion method called ‘The future, backwards’ are utilized to canvass the knowledge and divergent diverse views of employees, who would be impacted by the strategy, and to identify both the congruence and divergence of their views in order to help shape the value the strategic plan creates. The theoretical underpinning of the process is based on narrative (Weick & Browning, 1986) and the micro-sociological theory (Westley, 1990).

The process used here offers an insight into how strategic management can be developed in a public sector organization to help visualize its public value.

The process fills a gap in the academic literature and provides information for strategic practice by developing insights into how strategic management can be successfully employed in a public sector organization.

The process provides an example of a public sector based ‘value chain’ demonstrating how a public sector organization developed and articulated a public value creating strategy.

There are still many different theoretical approaches and practical interpretations about what an integrated report is. Starting from this premise, the overall purpose of this chapter is to critically analyze the relationship between integrated reporting (IR) and social/sustainability disclosure. Indeed, although some scholars considered IR as a tool to improve the sustainability approach of the companies allowing to disclose more relevant social information, others are more critical about the potentiality of IR to improve social disclosure. Therefore, the general research question is: Is there a natural link between IR and social disclosure (true love) or is the IR a practice to “normalize” the social disclosure and accounting (forced marriage)?

In the attempt to provide a preliminary answer to the research question, the chapter analyzes what is the approach of three categories: (1) academics; (2) soft-regulators; and (3) companies. From the methodological point of view, a mixed method of analysis has been adopted.

From the analysis of the three different points of view, IR can be considered as a “contested concept” because of the heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting interpretations and implementation that are done on this type of report. This leads to relevant theoretical and practical implications.

The study aims to contribute to the debate on how to identify and manage an organization’s sustainability-related resources and processes by understanding the impact of business activities on the environment and evaluating actions to ameliorate their impacts. Within this debate, and specifically taking into consideration the opportunity to support circular economy actions and initiatives, the study focuses on integrated reporting (IR) practices. In detail, this study advocates the joint use of IR principles with the dynamic resource-based view (DRBV) of the firm, adopting their representation of resources and impact of the business activities to identify environmental friendly “hot spots” in organizations. The framework is illustrated through two exploratory case studies.

This article critically reviews the latest Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines and recommended sustainability topics for public agencies, and presents normative argument by using Gray’s (2006) ecological and eco-justice (EEJ) approach to produce public value inscriptions of sustainability to represent sustainable public value.

The study presents a critical analysis and discussion of the changes to the GRI G4 and sustainability topics for public agencies from a managerialistic and EEJ approach.

We observe that the GRI continues to evolve while paying scant attention to furthering the Sector Supplement for Public Sector Agencies as it remains in its pilot form since its inception in 2005. Changes to the GRI are somewhat enlightening because several of the changes do begin to address a more comprehensive view of how any organization, including public agencies, can contribute to an EEJ approach to sustainability.

In the future it is important to be aware that, as inscriptions, the GRI guidelines have the potential power to influence how managers in public agencies approach sustainability. As Dumay, Guthrie, and Farneti (2010) previously argued, if guidelines continue to approach sustainability from a ‘managerialistic’ approach then there is little hope of public sector agencies adopting EEJ practices. We argue that organizations should act referring to Gray’s EEJ approach.

In recent years, international bodies and public opinion have recommended that governments adopt social responsibility practices to inform and be accountable to citizens about their sustainability actions in environmental, social and economic fields (Galera et al., 2014) and restore citizens' confidence in public authorities (Crane et al., 2008; Shepherd et al., 2010). This chapter reviews the literature on measuring and reporting sustainable performance in the public sector. Analyzing 35 studies published in a period of 10 years (from 2012 to 2021), we address two specific research questions: How and to what extent have public organizations changed to integrate sustainability reporting (SR) systems? What are the enabling organizational factors in adopting SR in public organizations?