The Integrated Reporting Initiative from an Institutional Perspective: Emergent Factors

Abstract

Abstract The financial crisis and its negative effects upon the global economy emerged in demand for corporate reporting transparency. This can be attained by issuing integrated reports in which financial and sustainability reporting interrelate. In contrast to traditional reporting where corporate responsibility or environmental reports were separate documents from the annual financial report, by integration, the report gains commitment to the environment, social recognition, and a more efficient management system. In 2011, the International Integrated Reporting Committee was submitting its first document on integrated reports. Since then, the organization has been the main driver for integrated reporting practices. The IIRC has initiated a pilot program for corporations willing to adopt integrated reporting. This initiative has gained the interest of more than 75 worldwide organizations that decided to submit for this programme. We argue that the emerging determinants of the voluntary adoption of an integrated reporting system are the political, cultural, and economic factors. We build the research design on institutional theory and involves a content analysis on the reports issued by the corporations in the IIRC pilot programme. The problem statement of this paper involves the determination of the emergent factors for integrated reporting- from an institutional perspective. The main scope of the research is to investigate whether we can find a correlation between the voluntary adoption of integrated reporting and the external political, cultural and economic factors as argued according to the institutional theory. The applied research methodology implies content analysis and SPSS data processing. The findings bring evidence that the political, cultural, and economic factor, are influencing the release of integrated reports.