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This paper investigates how contemporary public policy for public-private partnerships (PPPs) deals with non-financial values and thereby shapes the way social, cultural and environmental issues are accounted for.

A case study critically analyses PPP policy in Victoria, Australia, an acknowledged leader in the area. The investigation of the policy’s approach to non-financial value focusses on the treatment of social and environmental issues, particularly in relation to indigenous cultural heritage values.

It is found that important non-financial issues are characterised as risks to be quantified and monetised in PPP project assessment. A critical analysis shows that this approach obscures many significant dimensions of social, environmental and Indigenous cultural heritage value. The resultant relegation of non-financial values in public discourse and decision-making is seen to entrench unsustainable practices.

The paper shows how public policy may shape actions and outcomes that impact directly on social, environmental and indigenous cultural heritage values.

This study provides insights into contemporary social and environmental accounting and accountability for PPPs. It adds to the understanding of the implications of public policy framings of non-financial values.

This paper aims to introduce the special issue on “sustainability and accounting for non-financial matters: qualitative and quantitative research approaches”. This special issue was organised at the time when the entire globe was affected by the Coronavirus and accordingly, this paper has taken this opportunity to discuss the implications of this pandemic on accounting for non-financial issues, especially in relation to sustainability accounting research and practice.

An analysis of public documents and limited academic research on the Coronavirus was undertaken in this paper to highlight how life as it existed has fundamentally changed. The authors also review the papers published in this special issue and identifies research opportunities arising from the current environment.

The onslaught of the Coronavirus provides both challenges and opportunities for the practice of, and research into, accounting for non-financial matters, such as sustainability. The papers published in this special issue promote understanding and linking of sustainability reporting practices, to creating firm values, as well as identifying current and emerging challenges. The special issue explores criteria for the construction of accounting technology that is consistent with agnostic-based critical accounting and accountability, a business case for managers and practitioners to formulate strategic and management control systems in response to climate change issues, legitimacy and the use of photographs in sustainability reporting to create value, effective disclosures of business and sustainability ethics practiced by the firm for reputation building and value creation, indigenous accounting in mining companies, public sector policy framing of non-financial value, the barriers to sustainability reporting because of lack of awareness and knowledge and inadequate regulatory support in developing countries and the significance of sustainability accounting education to improve sustainability reporting practices in developing countries.

Future research opportunities in relation to the impact of the Coronavirus on accounting for non-financial value are identified. Given that COVID-19 is a societal matter, the practical implications of the Coronavirus in accounting for non-financial value creation are highlighted. The Coronavirus has challenged the existing economic paradigm and non-financial issues will capture the attention of corporations, other institutions, civil society and governments.

The Coronavirus has challenged the existing economic paradigm and non-financial issues will capture the attention of corporations, other institutions, civil society and governments.

Given that COVID-19 is a societal matter, the practical implications of the Coronavirus in accounting for non-financial value creation are highlighted.

This study, to the knowledge, is one of the pioneer academic studies that has explored the implications of the Coronavirus on accounting for non-financial value. In addition, this special issue includes papers that highlight how non-financial reporting matters are increasingly being given attention by companies to enhance business practices on sustainability through different perspectives.

The purpose of this study is to characterise types of practices – or “routings” as they are denoted in this paper – that have been developed to incorporate non-financial inscriptions, representing value-in-kind (VIK) sponsorship resources, into accounting systems.

This study adopts field-based research, utilising Latour's (1999) concept of “circulating reference”, to illustrate how VIK (non-cash) resources were managed in an Australian sporting organization.

This paper contributes to our understanding of: first, how accounting infrastructure is constituted and stabilised by a network of multiple and overlapping accounting practices; second, how VIK resources are allocated and managed via local practices; and third, the importance of “budget relief” as a method of valuation in accounting practice.

Our paper has implications for understanding how financial and non-financial accounting inscriptions are related in practice, requiring both integration and separation within networks of multiple and overlapping routings of accounting practices.

Our work highlights previously unexplored accounting practices, which assist in the process of utilizing VIK resources in the context of a sporting organization.

Although ethical management would seem to be a core responsibility in today’s business climate, empirical research and practical applications in the hospitality industry remain scarce. Hence, the aim of this study is to examine the influences of ethical value and corporate philanthropy on the foodservice industry in South Korea.

Frequency, reliability, confirmatory factor, correlation and structural equation modeling analyses were used.

The results indicate that, overall, ethical value directly influences corporate philanthropy and two aspects of organizational commitment (i.e. continuous and affective). Corporate philanthropy, in turn, positively relates to organizational commitment dimensions as well as financial and non-financial performance. Affective and continuous commitments lead to improvements in both financial and non-financial performance.

The strategic importance of ethical value and the following philanthropic activities in the foodservices is demonstrated from the findings of this research.

The current study is the first to develop and test an empirical model which accounts for the effects of ethical value on both financial and non-financial performances in the franchisor–franchisee relationship.

The 2008 Crash (the Crash) has been attributed to the dominance of financialized corporate governance, particularly an increased shareholder value rhetoric. Following the Crash, this extreme narrative is understood to have become less financialized through increasingly favouring stakeholders. The purpose of this research is to investigate this often-accepted view using field theory, wherein managers' biases in the value-creating process result from an interconnected, dynamic, multi-actor discourse.

Various domains across the UK’s corporate governance environment, from the perspective of field theory, generate the complex discourse: corporate and regulatory domains, stakeholder organizations such as the press and think tanks. Domain-specific corpora, representative of this multi-actor field, were constructed, with financialization analysed by assessing managers’ altering biases concerning the relative importance of shareholders and stakeholders (amongst other factors like time horizon) to value creation.

Highlights of the multiple findings include the following: corporate narrative about value creation became less financialized following the Crash, yet favouring shareholders, while the multi-actor discourse for the UK economy as a whole became slightly more financialized.

Analysing a multi-actor discourse is complex. And this, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is the first study of its kind, and only made possible with the original methodology of narrative staining. The approach, while having particular relevance to field theory, is applicable to many other narrative-based research scenarios.

There is increasing recognition of the importance of intangible assets. There is also a pressing need for a set of widely accepted metrics by which corporate leaders and the investment community can account for the non‐financial factors that affect value creation in the modern enterprise. Intangibles have always been a driver of corporate performance, and institutional investors take intangibles into account in their analysis and earnings estimates. Managers, by the same token, are increasingly adopting non‐traditional methodologies of measurement. The authors report on the work of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young researchers who have developed a rigorous, comprehensive model, the value creation index. The index combines the impact of key value drivers (e.g. innovation, quality, customer relations, management capabilities, alliances, technology, brand value, employee relations, and environmental and community issues) to form a single measure of non‐financial performance.

The purpose of this paper is to provide preliminary evidence on current practices in non-financial key performance indicator (KPI) reporting in annual reports by listed Australian companies to inform Australian legislators and accounting standard setters contemplating regulations and guidance for non-financial performance disclosure, including input into the revision of IFRS Practice Statement 1: Management Commentary (2010).

Non-financial KPIs were hand-collected from the annual report narratives of 40 listed Australian companies from five sectors in 2016. Trends in the type, quantity, comparability and range of non-financial KPIs were analysed, and the association between company characteristics and non-financial disclosure was explored.

In total, 78 per cent of the sampled companies disclose non-financial KPIs in their annual reports, reporting 11 non-financial KPIs per company on average. The most common category is Employee, followed by Environment, accounting for 68 per cent of non-financial KPIs. Provision of comparators is low, with only 28 per cent of non-financial KPIs disclosed with prior year results and 24 per cent disclosed with a target. Companies disclose across a median of two out of seven categories. Company size is shown to be associated with non-financial measures.

The study contributes initial detailed empirical Australian evidence of non-financial KPI reporting practices. A framework is established for assessing non-financial KPI disclosure, adding to voluntary disclosure studies. A data collection method is developed for collecting KPIs from annual report narratives, contributing to the methodology used in voluntary reporting content analysis.

Top management routinely accuses the investment community of being too “short‐term, bottom‐line‐oriented” in its assessments of share value. The difficulty of making strategic investments in such an environment is widely bemoaned. A new study by the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, however, yields a surprising finding: major investors' decisions are in fact significantly influenced by non‐financial performance information. It turns out that over a third of the typical investor's allocation decision is attributable not to the Financials but to other information on performance areas perceived to be leading indicators of future profitability. These include perceptions of a company's strategic vision and the company's ability to execute against it, the credibility of management, the prospects of innovations in the pipeline, the ability to attract talented people, and so on.

Integrated reporting (IR) aims to provide disclosures of the connectivity of non-financial and financial value creation aspects. These disclosures are defined as the disclosed connectivity of the capitals resulting from integrated thinking. This paper aims to investigate the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals in integrated reports and its underlying managerial discretion by drawing on economic-based theories.

Regression analyses are applied to examine the associations between economic firm-level characteristics and the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals. The analyses are based on a content analysis of 169 integrated reports disclosed in 2013 and 2014 by Forbes Global 2000 companies.

This paper finds high heterogeneity in the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals in current IR practice. This heterogeneity is related to drivers arising from economic-based theories. Firms’ non-financial and financial performance and the importance of strategic shareholders and debt providers are positively associated with the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals. The complexity of the business model and a highly competitive environment are negatively associated with the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals.

This paper extends qualitative IR studies on the disclosed connectivity of the capitals by quantitative results from a content analysis for a cross-sectional and global sample. Additionally, this study adds to prior IR literature on the drivers of the binary decision to disclose an integrated report by focusing on the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals.

For report preparers, users and standard setters, the results reveal that perceived cost-benefit considerations (signaling vs. direct and proprietary costs) may explain managerial discretion regarding the connectivity of the capitals within integrated reports.

This paper examines integrated reports, which are intended to inform providers of financial capital and other stakeholders about the connectivity of the six capitals of the IR framework.

This paper develops a metric disclosure measure of the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals. It provides initial evidence of how the IR framework’s focus on this key characteristic is realized in disclosure practice. Concerns about competitive disadvantages and preparation costs limit this key characteristic of integrated reports.

This paper aims to examine the value relevance (VR) of accounting information (AI) presented by Egyptian listed non-financial companies. Further, the study investigates the influence of institutional ownership on the value relevance of AI in a developing market, namely, the Egyptian market.

The study uses data from 2014 to 2017 with a total of 248 observations and analyses the data using regression analysis. Data are collected from the nonfinancial companies listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

The authors found that the AI reported by the Egyptian listed non-financial companies is value relevant. Regarding the influence of institutional ownership, it is found to significantly impact the VR of AI reported by the sample companies. This model investigated the effect of corporate size and financial leverage as controlling variables and found that they have an insignificant influence on the VR of AI.

The current study findings enrich the literature by enhancing the understanding regarding institutional owners’ impact on corporate value. Further, bringing evidence from an emerging market can have implications for accounting researchers interested in addressing other emerging markets with similar contextual and institutional environments.