Integrated Reporting: Much Ado About Nothing?

Abstract

Integrated reporting developed rapidly in the past few years, helping companies sharing their value creation processes with their stakeholders. With the increased attention for the International Integrated Reporting Framework issued by the International Integrated Reporting Council, the number of companies involved in integrated thinking and integrated reporting is growing, presumably in order to benefit from the claimed advantages. Although in literature a wide range of benefits are attributed to integrated reporting, our study shows that many of these claimed benefits are not supported by empirical evidence. Using legitimacy theory and management fashion theory, we make a preliminary assessment of the development of the integrated reporting concept and the potential influence of academic research. We review the existing body of academic literature, identify claims about benefits of IR and analyze the sources and the level of substantiation of these claims. Our findings suggest that only a few of the claimed advantages of integrated reporting are supported by empirical evidence and most of the claims stem from only a limited number of original sources. Based on these results and our assessment of the development of the IR concept we then propose a future research agenda.