The Uptake of Sustainability Reporting in Australia
By C. Higgins, M. Milne, B. Gramberg. 2015
114 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this paper, we identify and discuss how sustainability reporting has spread throughout the Australian business community over the past twenty years or so. We identified all Australian business organisations that have produced a sustainability report since 1995, and we undertook an interview survey with managers of reporting companies. By incorporating a wide range and large number of reporting companies, we offer insights beyond those obtained from traditional report content analysis and from close analyses of singular case-study organisations. We reveal that sustainability reporting has deepened in a few high-impact industries, and it has spread to a small number of firms in a wide range of low-impact industries. We tested whether there were any relationships between the drivers of reporting and the experiences of different types of reporting firms. Many of the relationships we observed were not as clear or as consistent as expected. Sustainability reporting is, however, of strategic importance to reporting companies. Given the small number of reporters in Australia, we raise the possibility of strategic differentiation as a key driver of reporting behaviour and suggest further studies to explore institutional fields that may be shaping sustainability reporting practice.
Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f5616716392f2d4f2fabe5a66c1a9f288e8deba
Citations in the corpus
- Accounting for the Unaccountable: Biodiversity Reporting and Impression Management (2014, unknown): “Previously confined to few proactive organizations, sustainability reporting has become a common practice, particularly among large companies (Higgins et al. 2014; KPMG 2013).”
- Stakeholders’ Perspectives on the Role of Regulatory Reform in Integrated Reporting (2015, unknown): “KPMG’s (2013) latest survey on sustainability reporting found that 93 % of the G250 and 71 % of the N100 now issue sustainability reports, up from 50 organisations in 1992 (KPMG et al. 2010).”