Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the challenges that companies could face over time when dealing with sustainability reporting (SR) and focusses on potential mechanisms they may adopt to cope with them.

The investigation is conducted adopting the theoretical framework proposed by Baret and Helfrich (2018) and using a longitudinal case study.

The authors found that the challenges that gradually arose induced the evolution of SR. Dissemination, employees’ involvement, managerial commitment and routinization/institutionalization of reporting practices appeared to be useful mechanisms to face the related challenges. Conversely, the authors found that stakeholders’ engagement scarcely affected SR. Furthermore, the legislation impacted the extent and quality of disclosed contents and fostered the standardization of the reporting process.

In analysing how Estra faced SR challenges, this paper emphasizes the mechanisms that can be used to properly manage them, in a gradual and holistic way. Hence, this study offers a useful example for companies approaching SR for the first time.

The authors adopt a holistic theoretical perspective providing evidence on how SR development within a company depends on the continuous and integrated management of its multiple challenges, also suggesting that its interdependencies with the definition and execution of sustainability should be exploited.

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 study aimed to understand the significance of how employee personhood and the act of speaking up is shaped by factors such as employees' professional status, length of employment within their hospital sites, age, gender and their ongoing exposure to unprofessional behaviours.

Responses to a survey by 4,851 staff across seven sites within a hospital network in Australia were analysed to interrogate whether speaking up by hospital employees is influenced by employees' symbolic capital and situated subjecthood (SS). The authors utilised a Bourdieusian lens to interrogate the relationship between the symbolic capital afforded to employees as a function of their professional, personal and psycho-social resources and their self-reported capacity to speak up.

The findings indicate that employee speaking up behaviours appear to be influenced profoundly by whether they feel empowered or disempowered by ongoing and pre-existing personal and interpersonal factors such as their functional roles, work-based peer and supervisory support and ongoing exposure to discriminatory behaviours.

The findings from this interdisciplinary study provide empirical insights around why culture change interventions within healthcare organisations may be successful in certain contexts for certain staff groups and fail within others.

This paper aims to provide an overview of South African perspectives on preventing, monitoring and combating hate victimisation, towards informing international understandings.

Using a general review approach, this paper provides a historical examination of measures proposed by the South African Government and civil society since 1994, to prevent, monitor and combat hate crime, hate speech and intentional unfair discrimination.

Regardless of a constitutional commitment to social inclusion, diversity and minority rights, significant progress remains lacking after almost three decades of related advocacy, lobbying and limited government intervention. Findings of the South African Hate Crimes Working Group (HCWG) longitudinal Monitoring Project emphasise the need for decisive legal responses to hate victimisation.

A Bill, recognising hate crime and hate speech as distinct criminal offences, has been in development for almost 15 years and will soon serve before Parliament. Enactment of this legislation will be ground-breaking in Africa.

This paper contributes to the field of hate studies by providing an overview of the journey towards current conceptual understandings of hate in (South) Africa. It sets the stage for evaluating the potential of the redesigned HCWG monitoring tool, which holds promise for early identification and intervention in hate hotspots and targeted sectors. This instrument can establish trends not only in South Africa but also across the African continent.

Sustainable development requires multiple stakeholders to work and learn across practices, in other words, it requires boundary crossing competence. To prepare students for their future sustainability professions, higher education should facilitate the development of boundary crossing competence in its curricula. This study aims to confirm whether boundary crossing learning can be stimulated by workshop-based support in multi-stakeholder projects.

This quasi-experimental intervention study (N = 122) investigates the effect of a series of supporting workshops on students’ boundary crossing learning in multi-stakeholder projects. The workshops allowed students to adopt four learning mechanisms (identification, coordination, reflection and transformation) theorised to stimulate learning across boundaries between practices. Students followed zero, one, or two workshops. By analysing the student learning reports, the study examines the effect of the workshop intervention on students’ self-efficacy for stakeholder collaboration, the number of reported student-stakeholder collaborative activities and the reported boundary crossing learning mechanisms.

The results show that a series of two workshops increase the number of reported collaborative activities and activates the students’ boundary crossing learning in terms of reflection and transformation.

These findings support the evidence-based design of multi-stakeholder learning environments for sustainable development and contribute to the body of knowledge regarding learning across practices.

Boundary crossing competence receives increasing attention as an asset for sustainable development. The added value of this study lies in its confirmation that the boundary crossing theory can be translated into directed educational support that can stimulate students’ boundary crossing learning.

This paper aims to explore the reporting challenges and related organisational mechanisms of change associated with disclosing corporate risks within integrated reports.

This paper adopts a Latourian performative approach to explore the organisational mechanisms of change in terms of networks of actors, both “human” and “non-human”, involved in the preparation of risk-related disclosure. Empirical evidence is collected by means of in-depth interviews with the preparers of an integrated reporting pioneer company.

Preparing disclosure on corporate risks in the context of integrated reporting demands close interaction among several actors. When disclosure shifts from listing key risks to providing information on how these risks are managed or connect with corporate strategy and value creation, departments not usually involved in corporate reporting play an active role and external stakeholders offer pertinent insights, benchmarks and feedback. Integrated reporting and risk management frameworks are the “non-human” actors that facilitate the engagement of diverse “human” actors.

Preparers should be aware that risk disclosure within integrated reports requires collaboration among (“human”) actors belonging to different departments and the engagement of external stakeholders. Preparers should consider the frameworks of integrated reporting and risk management as facilitators of cross-departmental discussions and dialogue, rather than mere contributors of guidelines and recommendations.

This study enriches the scant literature on organisational mechanisms of change made in response to integrated reporting challenges, showing subsequent advancements in the organisational process underlying the preparation of risk disclosure.

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.

The purpose of this research is to provide an integrated approach of organizational ecology, population ecology and selection mechanisms within the context of the resource-based view of the firm, evolutionary economics (EC) and transaction cost economics (TCE). It applies this framework to examine the interrelationships between corporate social reporting (CSR) and global reporting initiative.

The methodology for this paper is library-based archival research. It is qualitative and analytically descriptive of prior academic research and published literature on the subject.

CSR has the potential to provide functional credence to corporate social and environmental activities by legitimizing institutionalized corporate norms and behavior.

Accounting scholars have recognized the need for an integrated approach in the social sciences to examine the multifaceted aspects of sustainability development and accounting. This research highlights that sustainability is related to ecosystems, environments, natural resources, demography, population, culture, political systems and history.