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This paper aims to investigate whether managers use impression management through the presentation of non-financial information in an integrated reporting setting.

The authors performed an experiment with experienced professional controllers and part-time students enrolled in the executive master’s degree in finance and control at universities in the Netherlands. In this experiment, we manipulated the financial performance to test if managers present non-financial information differently based on the firm’s financial performance.

This study found that impression management is not applied by including or excluding non-financial key performance indicators (KPIs) in the integrated report, but by using more prominent presentation forms for positive non-financial performance and non-prominent ones for negative non-financial performance. However, the use of impression management through the presentation form decreased when the firms’ financial performance was positive. In that instance, this study noted that managers statistically significantly more often decided to present poor non-financial performance in a prominent presentation format in comparison to managers who were not aware of the financial performance.

A limitation of this paper is that the authors focused on only two impression management strategies: opportunistic/under-reporting and the presentation form. This analysis shows that the use of impression management mainly seems to occur through the presentation format. Future research could investigate other impression management strategies in an integrated reporting setting.

The results of this study are of importance for users of integrated reports, because it will provide more insight into whether firms are truly transparent in their integrated reports. Furthermore, the theoretical implication of this study is relevant to regulatory authorities, because it sheds light on the different forms of impression management used in integrated reporting and the influence of positively or negatively performing KPIs on the decisions of preparers of integrated reports.

Therefore, in this study, the authors add to prior literature by investigating the concept of impression management in an integrated reporting setting. More specifically, the authors perform an experiment and focus on different forms of impression management (the presentation format and under-reporting) through non-financial KPIs in an integrated reporting setting and link it to firm financial performance.

This study aims to offer empirical evidence on how integrated thinking affects the integrated reporting (IR) practice and how integrated thinking originates from board and management involvement, cross-functional integration and integral link between capitals and strategies.

This study is cross-sectional and uses a mixed-method approach. The empirical data for the quantitative approach were collected from the 129 public companies listed on Colombo Stock Exchange in Sri Lanka. The personale responsible for preparing the annual report are selected as the respondents of this study. This study used partial least square modelling to test the hypotheses. The quantitative approach results are triangulated across a qualitative research approach in semi-structural interviews with ten responsible officers of integrated reporting practices.

The central finding of this study is the significant positive relationship between integrated thinking and integrated reporting practice. The qualitative results supported the quantitative findings and show that board and management involvement, cross-functional integration and integral link between capital and strategy enhance the integrated reporting practice. Top management and board management have positive beliefs about the integrated reporting practice; they initiate, encourage, influence, involve and support it. Furthermore, all company departments are involved with the integrated reporting led by the finance department and practice good coordination, communication and collaboration between departments. Moreover, it also evidenced their concern about the linkage between capital and strategy and how they do it in their organisation when practising integrated reporting.

The firms which intend to practice or enhance integrated reporting will be benefited from this study. Hence, this research assists in constructing IT through the direct role of the board and senior leadership, breaking down silos to diffuse IR throughout structures and processes, and concentrating on strategies while managing their capitals and relationships over the long term.

This study provides the initial quantitative empirical evidence on the impact of integrated thinking on integrated reporting practice. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to operationalise both integrated thinking and integrated reporting based on a questionnaire that developed and tested both constructs as higher-order reflective formative and on the relationship between integrated thinking and integrated reporting. The mixed-method approach to examine the relationship between integrated thinking and integrated reporting provides additional insights into the existing literature.

The current paper aims at exploring the audit committee characteristics’ effect on impression management.

The methodology is based on the use of the content analysis of financial annual reports, as data of a 69-company sample study from 2015 to 2019 attained from “Amman Stock Exchange” has been analyzed. Moreover, multiple regression analysis on panel data was employed.

The results show that the independence of the audit committee, the financial expertise of the audit committee and female members negatively affect impression management, implying that these characteristics mitigate financial reporting manipulation and decrease the practices of impression management. However, the findings detect no significant influence for committee meetings on impression management.

Notably, the current work is applicable and useful for understanding the audit committee’s role in enhancing the financial reporting’s quality, along with the significance of the audit committee in growing the stakeholder’s confidence in financial reporting. In light of these results, regulatory bodies’ efforts are encouraged to create additional strategies and instructions to ensure the trustiness and credibility of financial reporting.

This paper will be useful to companies that want to improve the quality of financial reporting and decrease the impression of management’s effect on financial reporting’s readers. Moreover, this paper contributes to the literature on impression management by exploring the effect of audit committees on impression management of annual financial reports of the users in the context of emerging markets and Middle East countries, particularly Jordan.

Companies must no longer just report on corporate sustainability (CS) performance but also demonstrate that they are aligning their strategies with sustainability. However, suitable management control systems (MCS) are required to implement a sustainability strategy. Thereby, sustainability reporting (SR) can also be employed for control purposes. On the other hand, existing MCS can be used to develop SR that goes beyond accountability. Accordingly, this paper explores how this interplay can be designed.

For the study, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with persons from ATX and DAX companies. Since the interplay should be examined from a holistic control perspective, the authors used the MCS package of Malmi and Brown as an analysis framework.

Nowadays, merely focusing on reporting is too narrow a view. It is therefore not surprising that the investigation was able to reveal various possible linkages between MCS and SR that span the full range of the MCS package of Malmi and Brown.

Future research should also consider non-listed companies to investigate potential differences and take a closer look at the proposed reciprocal nature of the interplay.

The findings expand the knowledge of how companies can use SR for control purposes and how existing MCS can help develop a reporting that goes beyond accountability.

The study contributes by highlighting the potential of SR to control CS performance from a holistic MCS perspective and likewise the impact of existing MCS on reporting. In addition, different theoretical perspectives are used to explain why the interplay can be designed differently in practice.

The growing business complexity has caused many risks (e.g. operational, financial, reputational, cybersecurity, regulatory and compliance) that threaten companies' sustainability and have received attention from regulators, investors, and businesses. The authors present a model for assessing and reporting corporate risk by examining the indicators underlying corporate risk reporting.

A thorough review of the literature and semi-structured interviews with experts were conducted and the fuzzy Delphi technique was used to obtain consensus and screening of risks. The relationships between these risk indicators were recognized, weighted and prioritized by employing a hybrid Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory Model (DEMATEL) method integrated with Analytic Network Process (ANP) (DEMATEL-ANP [DANP]) approach. Finally, using the Iranian setting of corporate risk reporting, a model was developed to calculate the risk-reporting scores.

The results indicate that risk disclosure quality is more important than risk disclosures' textual properties and quantity. According to the experts, reporting the key risks that the company faces, management's approach to dealing with these risks and quantifying their impact are more important than the other indicators. The results also show that risk reporting in Iran lacks quantitative and specific information, and most risk disclosures are sticky.

The data have been prepared and analyzed according to the unique Iranian reporting environment, which should be considered when interpreting the results.

The results of this research can be used by the regulators of the Stock Exchange Organizations (SEO) to evaluate corporate risk reports and rank companies. Results are also relevant to investors and policymakers to identify companies with poor risk disclosure and to take necessary measures to improve their reporting practices.

This paper contributes to the social and governance literature by presenting the importance of risk reporting in corporate disclosures.

The unique Iranian setting of corporate risk reporting furthers the understanding of risk reporting and thus provides education, policy, practice and research implications for other emerging economies like Iran. Many prior studies focus mainly on the quality of risk disclosure, and other aspects of corporate risk disclosure presented in the study have remained largely overlooked. The corporate risk reporting attributes identified in the study are relevant to the rise of non-financial risks, the textual and qualitative nature of risk reporting and textual risk disclosures.

The primary objective of this research is to chronicle how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other United States Federal Government Agencies (USFGA) agencies have played a role in shaping the trajectory of financial reporting for sustainability, with a particular emphasis on triple bottom line (TBL). This exploration extends to other indexes reporting sustainability data encompassed within financial, social and environmental reporting.

This study adopts an illustrative methodology, utilizing data sourced from governmental, business and international organizational documents.

Sustainability accounting predominantly finds its place within the framework of TBL. However, it is crucial to note that sustainability reporting remains voluntary rather than mandatory. Nevertheless, accounting firms and professional accounting societies have embraced it as a supplementary facet of financial accounting reporting.

The research highlights the historical evolution of sustainability within the USFGA and corporate entities. Corporations’ interest in accounting for sustainability performances has significantly contributed to the emergence of voluntary sustainability accounting rules, as embodied by the TBL.

This paper explores how the disclosure quality, measured by the abnormal tone of environmental and social report, may determine the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance of the firm. This study also investigates the impact of the moderator “board of directors” to explore the extent to which a well-balanced board of directors may affect this association within an impression management strategy.

This work uses a sample of 616 firm-year observations using a sample of French firms indexed on SBF120 index from 2010 to 2017. To test the developed hypotheses, the GLS regression is applied and to control for endogeneity issue and sample selection bias, the authors used, respectively, the two stage least square (2SLS) procedure and the Heckman model.

Findings suggest that a well-balanced board of directors moderates the relationship between the ESG performance and the disclosure quality. The positive effect of abnormal tone management on ESG is weakened by the presence of a good structure of the board, attenuating impression management initiatives.

The research provides evidence of the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting quality, in particular disclosure tone management, on the level of ESG performance in the French context. As the board of directors may have a major impact on weakening impression management strategies in particular tone management practices, in order to improve CSR report quality, the authors recommend French companies to ensure a well-balanced board of directors.

This study helps investors to comprehensively evaluate the information disclosed on CSR reports. It unveils that a strong board composition induces better quality of CSR report and brings better ESG performance. Thus, the study results point to the importance of a well-balanced board of directors and the regulation of the narrative disclosure of CSR information.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework emerged as a guidepost for the transition to sustainable development. To achieve this transition, companies are encouraged to integrate these goals into their business strategies, processes and corporate reporting cycle. The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the corporate SDGs reporting literature, develop insights into the state of this research field and identify a future research agenda.

Using a structured literature review (SLR) methodology, the paper reviews 65 empirical papers published in this field to identify how the current research is developing, offers a critique and identifies future research avenues to advance this field.

Corporate SDGs reporting is developing as a research area of great importance. The findings reveal that current SDGs reporting literature lacks theorisation, overly focusses on publicly listed companies and succinctly describes organisations’ engagement with the SDGs as superficial. Surprisingly, regions such as North America, the UK and other emerging economies have received less attention from scholars. Further, only a few authors have specialised in this field, and there currently exists low levels of international collaborations among authors as well as practitioners.

The paper provides a novel contribution to the emerging field of corporate SDGs reporting. The key theoretical implications from this study’s SLR include the need for more interventionist research. Although there is an increasing number of accounting scholars developing research within this field, the prevailing research is concentrated on corporate SDGs engagement, drivers of SDGs reporting and scope of SDGs reporting. Furthermore, the scientific discourse remains largely under-theorised with positivist framings primarily focussed on the “what” questions. Thus, a modification to the current approaches and research methods is necessary to advance this field further.

The study provides practitioners with valuable insights into the current state of corporate reporting on the SDGs. To achieve more substantive engagement and reporting, a deeper understanding of the factors that influence corporate behaviour and disclosure practices is necessary. In particular, the study identifies new opportunities for practitioners to enhance the value relevance of corporate SDGs reporting.

The paper offers a comprehensive structured review of the empirical papers published on corporate SDGs reporting. It contributes to deepening this nascent research field by identifying five distinct areas where accounting and business scholars may focus to advance the field further and contribute to achieving the SDGs agenda.

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 objective of this study is to examine developments in the discursive practice of non-financial reporting in the public healthcare sector. In doing so, the authors investigate how the main reform foci of productivity and quality are represented, with a specific focus on the patient.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), the authors conduct a longitudinal study (2007–2018) of healthcare reporting foci across the five administrative regions responsible for public hospitals in Denmark. The study analyses sixty annual reports and draws on contemporary reform documents over this period. CDA enables a micro-textual analysis, combined with macro-insights and discussions on social practice.

The findings show complex webs of presentation strategies, but in particular two changes occur during the period. First, the patient is centred throughout but the framing changes from productivity and waiting lists to quality and dialogue. Second, in the first years, the regions present themselves as actively highlighting financial and quality concerns, which changes to a passive and indirect form of presentation steered by indicators and patient legislation enforced by central government. This enhances passivity and distance in healthcare regional non-financial reporting where the regions seek to conform to such demands. Simultaneously, however, the authors find a tendency to highlight very different local initiatives, which shows an attempt to go beyond a pure automatic mode of reporting found in earlier studies.

Responding to the literature on both healthcare and financial reporting, this study identifies novel links between micro-level texts and macro-level social practices, enabling insights into the potentially intertwined impacts of public-sector reporting. The authors offer insights into the complexity of the construction of non-financial reporting in the public sector, which has a wider impact and different intentions than private-sector reporting.