From institutional integration to institutional demise: The disintegration of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)

Brendan O'Dwyer, Chris Humphrey and Nick Rowbottom

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, 2024, vol. 99, issue C

Abstract: This paper presents an in-depth contextual analysis of the rise and recent demise of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). The IIRC entered its ‘Breakthrough Phase’ for Integrated Reporting () in 2013 and progressed to its ‘Momentum Phase’ in late 2018. The ‘Global Adoption Phase’ of was expected to commence in 2021 and conclude in 2026. However, by the middle of 2023, the IIRC ceased to exist as a separate entity and the future adoption of its much vaunted Framework was fundamentally uncertain. Drawing on a comprehensive examination of documentary evidence and a series of 34 in-depth interviews with key players associated with the IIRC’s development, this paper studies how and why the IIRC went so rapidly from being a notable ‘is’ to a definitive ‘was’ in less than a decade. Our analysis traces the IIRC’s shifting strategic priorities in pursuit of a new corporate reporting norm and illustrates how these priorities underpinned a concerted effort at institutional integration in the corporate reporting field. We show how the nature of this attempted integration eventually led to the IIRC’s demise. In seeking to understand the IIRC’s strategic choices and actions we pinpoint the interrelated significance of ‘invisibilities and exclusions’, ‘the dance of agency’, and ‘conceptual promiscuity’. We conclude that the IIRC’s ultimate legacy may not be what it integrated in terms of corporate reporting but what it chose or was required to exclude or forget.

Keywords: Integrated reporting; International Integrated Reporting Council; Private governance; Standardization; Sustainability reporting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235423001600
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:crpeac:v:99:y:2024:i:c:s1045235423001600

DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2023.102699

Access Statistics for this article

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING is currently edited by Marcia Annisette, Christine Cooper and Yves Gendron

More articles in CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().