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The increasing responsibility of organisations towards society and the environment has inverted the relationship between accounting and accountability, leading to accountability-based accounting systems. This study aims to explore the debate on accountability for climate change within the integrating thinking (IT) perspective. Ascertaining the most significant trends in the debate around purposes and performance that characterise climate mitigation engagement and their connections, the study would explore if and to what extent organisations are tackling climate actions.

A narrative review of the extensive academic literature developed from the Kyoto Protocol to date was performed. After selecting a representative sample, papers were analysed with the support of a new analytical framework that involves three dimensions – answerability, enforcement and outcome – and governance schemes that emerge from the involvement of the private and public sector and civil society. With the support of NVivo software, themes arisen were analysed and coded. Key items were labelled, creating specific nodes and synthesised into the proposed framework.

A “silo approach” largely characterises the debate on accountability for climate change. The most significant reasons behind the shortcomings of extant climate actions may be retrieved firstly in the weakness of the motivations that guide organisations to operate in a climate-friendly way.

This study underlines the need for a 360° integrated approach for strategically tackling climate actions.

This study would represent a further step towards an integrated approach for studying organisations behaviours in the “climate war”, embracing the connectivity between purposes and outcomes, capitals and the relationships amongst the various stakeholders.

This study aims to examine the listing of firms at the highest corporate governance level of the Brazilian stock exchange (B3) as a means of legitimation and its relationship with risk and return on investment.

This paper analyzes 205 companies from 2010 to 2019, in which firms listed at the Novo Mercado level were compared with groups composed of other firms traded on B3.

The main results demonstrate that a listing at the supposedly higher level of corporate governance in Brazil does not indicate lower risk, a higher return or even a better risk-return ratio.

The findings are restricted to this sample, representing the association identified between the analyzed phenomena and not a cause-effect relationship.

The highest level of corporate governance in Brazil brings together firms that present a higher risk (at least systematic) and lower returns (at least financial) because they seek to legitimize themselves in the market as firms committed to better management practices.

These findings are useful to investors, the stock exchange, regulatory agents and the companies themselves to reflect on the purpose and usefulness of different levels of corporate governance in Brazil.

This study differs from the others that relate corporate governance to risk or return because it does not deal individually with corporate governance practices, but rather the phenomenon that is listed in a special governance level, created by the stock exchange, serving as a kind of seal legitimation.

This paper aims to trace subsequent steps of the sustainability reporting evolution in terms of changes in the organisation fields and professional jurisdictions involved. As such, it highlights the (interrelated) organisational and professional challenges associated with the progressive incorporation of “sustainability” within corporate reporting.

The paper draws on Suddaby and Viale’s (2011) theorisation of how professionals reshape organisational fields to highlight how organisational spaces, actors, rules and professional capital evolve alongside the incorporation of sustainability within corporate reporting.

The paper shows organisational spaces, actors, rules and professional capital mobilised during the recent evolution of sustainability reporting, starting from a period in which there was no space for sustainability, to more recent periods in which sustainability gained increasing momentum beyond initial niches, and culminating in more integrated forms of sustainability reporting.

Although the analysis is limited to empirical evidence collected by prior research and practice on sustainability reporting, the paper offers a view to imagine how the incorporation of sustainability within corporate reporting relies on and affects organisational fields and professional jurisdictions.

The paper offers a lens to interpret corporate and professional challenges associated with the more recent evolutions of sustainability reporting practice and standard setting. It also allows framing the papers accepted in the special issue on “new challenges in sustainability reporting” and concludes by suggesting an agenda for future research.

This study investigates the influence of corporate culture on financial reporting transparency within Iranian firms.

Leveraging a dataset of 1,480 firm-year observations from the Tehran Stock Exchange spanning from 2013 to 2022, the study employs text mining to quantify linguistic features of corporate culture and transparency, specifically readability and tone, within annual financial statements and Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) reports.

Our results confirm a positive and significant relationship between corporate culture and financial reporting transparency. The distinct dimensions of corporate culture — Creativity, Competition, Control, and Collaboration — each uniquely enhance financial transparency. Robustness tests including firm fixed-effects, entropy balancing, Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) validate the profound influence of corporate culture on transparency. Additionally, our analysis shows that corporate culture significantly affects the disclosure of business, operational, and financial risks, with varying impacts across risk categories. Cross-sectional analysis further reveals how the impact of corporate culture on transparency varies significantly across different industries and firm sizes.

The study’s scope, while focused on Iran, opens avenues for comparative research in different cultural and regulatory environments. Its reliance on text mining could be complemented by qualitative methods to capture more nuanced linguistic subtleties.

Findings underscore the strategic importance of cultivating a transparent corporate culture for enhancing financial reporting practices and stakeholder trust, particularly in emerging economies with similar dynamics to Iran.

This research is pioneering in its quantitative analysis of the textual features of corporate culture and its impact on transparency within Iranian corporate reports, integrating foundational theoretical perspectives with empirical evidence.

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.

Building on the institutional theory perspective on corporate governance change and based on interviews with investor relations (IR) managers in large Japanese companies, this study aims to examine Japanese IR managers’ perceptions of the influence of foreign shareholders on Japan’s corporate governance reform and stakeholder-based system. The paper examines tensions, conflicts and collaborations among different stakeholders involved in corporate governance changes in Japan, especially in the areas of firm ownership, employment relations and boards of directors. The paper explains why convergence does not happen in some large Japanese companies by investigating Japanese managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in multiple corporate contexts.

The author conducted in-depth interviews with ten IR managers at large, listed Japanese companies in Kyoto and Tokyo and two managers at foreign investment banks in Tokyo, between 2018 and 2021.

This paper explores five themes that emerged from my interviews: Chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) mixed perceptions of foreign investors, the effectiveness of CEO compensation and outside directors, managers’ reluctance to accept stock price-driven business strategies, foreign investors’ engagement vs investments in index funds and gender patterns, including the effectiveness of token female outside directors. The Japanese companies the author looked at incorporated foreign shareholders as consultants and adopted a few major shareholder-based customs, such as CEOs communicating with investors, having outside directors, increasing CEO compensation and slimming down unprofitable parts of the business via restructuring and downsizing. Simultaneously, they resisted a few major shareholder-based practices. Foreign shareholders’ pressure revealed tensions and contradictions between the Japanese stakeholder system and shareholder primacy-based customs.

This paper is one of the few qualitative studies that explores Japanese IR managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in corporate governance reform, with a particular focus on ownership, employment relations and board members. This paper provides examples of tension, conflict and cooperation between Japanese managers and foreign investors, as seen through the eyes of Japanese IR managers. Examining changes in Japan’s stakeholder-based system of corporate governance reform enables us to better understand the processes by which, with vigorous pressure from government and foreign shareholders, a non-western country like Japan may adopt shareholder-based customs and how such a change may also lead to institutional changes.

The debate about whether corporate reports should focus on numbers or narrative is long-standing. The recent push for business model information to be included in corporate reports has revitalised the debate. Many scholars suggest this constitutes a move towards narrative-based reporting. This study aims to investigate the debate and draws a comparison with the juxtaposition of the narrative and rational paradigms. This study also investigates how accountingisation influences the way business model information is presented in corporate reports.

This study analyses data from the financial and non-financial reports from 86 globally listed companies. This study first uses content analysis to code the data. This study then uses a partial least squares-structural equation model to test how accountingisation influences how firms report their business model information.

This study finds that accountingisation and a rational paradigm shape how companies present information about their business model in their financial and non-financial reports. This suggests that the dominance of quantitative measures in accounting affects even the presentation of narrative-based information. Despite the much-touted shift towards qualitative reporting, this study argues that companies find it difficult to cast off the yoke of a traditional numbers-based mindset.

This paper contributes to the debate on numbers- versus narrative-based corporate reporting and the workings of narrative and rational paradigms. In it, this study lays out theoretical and empirical findings of accountingisation. This study also makes a case for freeing corporate reports from the shackles of an accountingisation mindset.

This study provides new insights into how companies report information about their business models and the influence of narrative and rational paradigms on financial and non-financial reporting.

This article centres on the pertinence of redefining accounting for tomorrow, particularly for facilitating the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, thereby, for shaping a better world. In aspiring for accounting to reach its full potential as a multidimensional technical, social and moral practice, this paper aims to focus on ideas, initiatives and proposals for realising accounting’s future potential and responsibilities.

The study deploys a further developed “strategic implementation framework”, initially proposed by Carnegie et al. (2023), with an emphasis on accounting serving “the public interest” so as “to enable the flourishing of organisations, people and nature” (Carnegie et al., 2021a, p. 69; 2021b). It depicts strategies towards the future of accounting and the world.

Significant opportunities are identified for accounting and accountants, working closely with a diversity of stakeholders, to become alert to and cognisant of the nature, roles, uses and impacts of accounting. The evidence presented notes a predominant inattention of accounting and accountants to the SDGs despite the deteriorating state of our social and natural environment.

Whilst this article examines other articles in this special issue (SI), there is no substitute for carefully reading, reflecting on and deliberating upon these articles individually.

The time for accounting to focus on creating a better world can no longer be extended. Accounting’s full potential will not be realised by remaining in a narrow and complacent, technicist state.

This article examines how responsibility and strategy can and should be connected in a business organization.

The article offers a review of the field by mapping previous studies according to their strategy and responsibility orientations and, consequently, identifies the classic perspective, as well as the major deficiencies and prevailing research gaps in the literature.

The article contributes to the field of strategic corporate responsibility by reframing the field with a contender perspective that challenges the classic view of strategy and responsibility amalgamation. Together, the classic and the contender perspectives are synthesized to form an integrative perspective that is more holistic than those currently available.

The article ends by calling for a reimagining of the relationship between corporate responsibility and strategy to find promising future research avenues and effective business practices suitable to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The paper identifies the types of risks disclosed by Italian organisations using integrated reporting (IR). This paper aims to understand the level and features of risk disclosure with the adoption of IR.

The authors use risk classifications already provided in the literature to develop a content analysis of Italian organisations’ integrated reports published.

The content analysis reveals that most of the Italian organisations incorporate many types of risk disclosure into their integrated reports. Organisations use this alternative form of reporting to communicate risk differently from how they disclose risks in traditional annual financial reporting. That is, the study finds that the organisations use their integrated reports to disclose a broader group of risks, related to the environment and society, and do so using narrative and visual representation.

The paper contributes to a narrow stream of research investigating risk disclosure provided through IR, contributing to the understanding of the role of IR in representing an organisational risk.