Accounting for the value expectations of customers: Re-imagining the Integrated Reporting initiative

Abstract

• There is an avenue for re-imagining Integrated Reporting in a progressive manner. • The IR framework is weak in its conception of value creation and business models. • Customers are an under-emphasised stakeholder within the IR initiative. • The growing power of customers will hold businesses to be more accountable. • The value expectations of customers are a credible basis for re-imagining IR. This paper contributes to the critique of Integrated Reporting as a prelude to begin to re-imagine it as a potentially progressive development. Although it is possible to identify a number of important grounds on which to reject Integrated Reporting as an initiative of this sort, the paper pursues a further excavation of two key Integrated Reporting components, value creation and the business model, and identifies the customer and her/his value expectations as a credible basis for re-imagining Integrated Reporting in a more positive fashion.