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This study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese and Western corporate values in one story.

We use an analytical framework drawing on insights borrowed from narratology and the notion of wrapping – the traditional art of packaging as communication.

We find that Mitsubishi is a survivor company that uses different corporate reporting frameworks during its reporting journey to construct a bespoke narrative of its value creation and cultural values. It emplots narratives to convey a story presenting the impression that Mitsubishi is a Japanese corporation but is compatible with Western neo-liberal ideology, making bad news palatable to its stakeholders and instilling confidence in the future.

Wrapping is a culturally sensitive form of impression management used in the integration of corporate reporting. Therefore, rather than assuming that companies blatantly manipulate their image in corporate reports, we suggest that future research should focus on how narratives are constructed and made sense of, situating them in the context of local culture and traditions.

The findings should interest scholars, report preparers, policymakers, and the IFRS, considering the recent release of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards designed to reduce the so-called alphabet soup of corporate reporting. By following Mitsubishi’s journey, we learn how and why the notion of integrated reporting was adopted and integrated with other reporting frameworks to create narratives that together convey a story of a global corporation compliant with Western neoliberal ideology. It highlights how Mitsubishi used integrated reporting to tell its story rather than as a rigid reporting framework, and the same fate may apply to the new IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards that now include integrated reporting.

The study offers a new perspective on corporate reporting, showing how the local societal discourses of cultural heritage and modernity can shape the journey of the integration of corporate reporting over time.

In this chapter, we unpack what we experienced during the process of facilitating a group of early career researchers, and how we feel an approach to ‘humanising academia’ may have helped at least us to envision higher education not in terms of the struggle it is often depicted as but as a community and a safe space. Setting out with a conscious naivety, either ignoring (Taina) or ignorant of (Andrew) the ways things ‘should be done’ in academia, allowed us to start a critically supportive community of researchers. This chapter explores how this approach allowed us to engage with different modes of being together and to reconsider existing forms of togetherness. This ‘being together’ was related not only to academic hierarchies and positions but also to thinking, feeling and experiencing. Using lenses from affect theory and queer studies, we discuss how, without quite meaning to, we developed an ‘affective community’ of those interested in discovering alternative ways to approach the international dimension of higher education. This shows how enacting ideals of community can bring us to build a community beyond hierarchies and competition.