A critical reflection on the recent developments in voluntary corporate non-financial and sustainability reporting and disclosure: Lessons learnt from research on integrated reporting adoption in practice

This thesis is a critical reflection motivated by the recent developments occurring in the research on voluntary corporate non-financial and sustainability reporting and disclosure (VCnFSRD). This acronym binds together four issues that underlie the research. First, it focusses on information that is voluntarily provided by corporations to interested stakeholders. Therefore, what has been deliberately left out is analyses of any regulations that mandate disclosures, such as Directive2014/95/EU (European Parliament & Council of the European Union, 2014). Second, the reference to corporations is also deliberate. The focus here is not simply on organisations but rather on firms–either for-profit or not-for-profit–that present a corporate structure. Third, information beyond sustainability information is considered, including other types of non-financial information such as intellectual capital (Petty & Guthrie, 2000). Lastly, the distinction between reporting and disclosure is relevant here (Dumay, 2016; Dumay & Guthrie, 2017; La Torre, Sabelfeld, Blomkvist, & Dumay,2020). Reporting has to do with corporations providing periodic accounts of their activities to interested stakeholders (Buhr, Gray, & Milne, 2014; Dumay, 2016), whereas disclosure occurs when unknown or secret information is voluntarily made public by a corporation or involuntarily uncovered by other actors (Dumay & Guthrie, 2017; La Torre et al., 2020). Both are considered in this thesis.