Integrated reporting as a test of worth

Gillian Maree Vesty, Chao Ren and Sophia Ji

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 2018, vol. 31, issue 5, 1406-1434

Abstract: Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide practical insights into a senior manager’s engagement with integrated reporting (IR). This paper theorises IR as an accounting compromise and test of worth in an Australian IR pilot organisation. Design/methodology/approach - In-depth interviews with the chairman of the IR pilot organisation are analysed in the context of Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991, 2006) economies of worth (EW). A personal narrative approach was used to privilege the voice of an individual actor at the heart of decision making. Findings - In contributing to van Bommel’s (2014) use of EW to examine IR as an accounting compromise, the authors find that ambiguity in IR does not mean that reporting is getting harder to operationalise. Instead, IR is getting harder to justify. The relativism issues that IR has revealed suggest that if all views are met, any significant contributions would not stand out. Interviews reveal that the challenge for IR is to provide the means to report on the organisation’s broader societal impacts, which go beyond measures of IR value creation. Practical implications - This paper contributes to the accounting academy with practical insights on a dual-purpose organisation’s experiences with IR. The authors demonstrate how a chairman of the board uses accounting to navigate competing priorities and justify management decisions. Originality/value - This study offers unique insights from the chairman of an IR pilot organisation. A personal narrative approach contributes to the limited empirical literature in accounting using EW as a micro-level analytic.

Keywords: Integrated reporting; Integrated thinking; Compromise; Economies of worth; Personal narrative; Test of worth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:aaajpp:aaaj-08-2016-2684

DOI: 10.1108/AAAJ-08-2016-2684

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal is currently edited by Prof James Guthrie and Prof Lee Parker

More articles in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().