Sustainability, Popular and Integrated Reporting in the Public Sector: A Fad and Fashion Perspective

This paper provides a comparative analysis of different public accountability means used in the public sector - namely sustainability reporting, popular financial reporting and integrated reporting - in order to highlight their similarities and differences, and reflect on their development, with specific reference to the Italian context. In particular, we speculate about the practical and research implications of their emergence, through the lenses of accountability and managerial fad and fashion literature. The main novelty of the paper is that it is one of the first studies providing a comparative analysis of the three reporting tools debated both in practice and in research. We argue about their diffusion patterns, the commonalities and differences, which suggests different stages of evolution, different actors and forces at play. We provide some preliminary evidence on the risk that accountability innovations may end up just in a fad and fashion uptake, creating inefficiencies and not achieving the aims they are intended for. We also show how the available frameworks and standards have more in common than not, and that there is a risk of creating only new labels, without real innovation or improvement of public accountability.

[1]  P. Ruggiero,et al.  Seeking legitimacy: Social reporting in the healthcare sector , 2013 .

[2]  R. Burritt,et al.  Accountability for environmental performance of the Australian Commonwealth public sector , 1997 .

[3]  M. Dumitru,et al.  The Compliance of the Integrated Reports Issued by European Financial Companies with the International Integrated Reporting Framework , 2017 .

[4]  James Guthrie,et al.  Advancing Sustainable Management of Public and Not For Profit Organizations , 2010 .

[5]  J. Guthrie,et al.  Integrated reporting: A structured literature review , 2016 .

[6]  James Mahoney,et al.  Qualitative Methodology and Comparative Politics , 2007 .

[7]  R. Mussari,et al.  Practices of Social Reporting in Public Sector and Non-profit Organizations , 2010 .

[8]  Eric Abrahamson.  Managerial Fads and Fashions: The Diffusion and Rejection of Innovations , 1991 .

[9]  I. Steccolini.  Is the Annual Report an Accountability Medium? An Empirical Investigation into Italian Local Governments , 2004 .

[10]  James E. Groff,et al.  Municipal Financial Reporting on the World Wide Web: A Survey of Financial Data Displayed on the Official Websites of the 100 Largest U.S. Municipalities , 2004 .

[11]  J. Guthrie,et al.  Public Sector to Public Services: 20 Years of 'Contextual' Accounting Research , 2007 .

[12]  C. Hood.  Contemporary public management: a new global paradigm? , 1995 .

[13]  Eric Abrahamson,et al.  Management Fashion: Lifecycles, Triggers, and Collective Learning Processes , 1999 .

[14]  E. Bracci,et al.  Socio-environmental reporting trends in the Italian local government: Thrive or wither? , 2013 .

[15]  Bernardino Benito,et al.  An example of creative accounting in public sector: The private financing of infrastructures in Spain , 2008 .

[16]  F. Fusco,et al.  Social Reporting in the Italian Justice System: Milan Court Experience , 2016 .

[17]  Thomas Schillemans,et al.  Calibrating Public Sector Accountability: Translating experimental findings to public sector accountability , 2016 .

[18]  Adriana Tiron-Tudor,et al.  Ensuring More Sustainable Reporting in Europe Using Non-Financial Disclosure—De Facto and De Jure Evidence , 2018 .

[19]  R. Azarian.  Potentials and Limitations of Comparative Method in Social Science , 2011 .

[20]  Irvine Lapsley,et al.  New Public Management: The Story Continues , 2016 .

[21]  Jenny M. Lewis,et al.  Accountability: To Whom, in Relation to What, and Why? , 2014 .

[22]  M. Bovens,et al.  Does Public Accountability Work? An Assessment Tool , 2008 .

[23]  R. Gray.  Social, environmental and sustainability reporting and organisational value creation? , 2006 .

[24]  J. Guthrie,et al.  Sustainability reporting by Australian public sector organisations: Why they report , 2008 .

[25]  G. Boyce.  Professionalism, the Public Interest, and Social Accounting , 2014 .

[26]  S. Newberry.  Public sector accounting: shifting concepts of accountability , 2015 .

[27]  Laura Rocca,et al.  Overcoming the Barriers to the Diffusion of Sustainability Reporting in Italian LGOs: Better Stick or Carrot? , 2018 .

[28]  I. Steccolini,et al.  Social and environmental reporting in local authorities , 2005 .

[29]  A. Halachmi,et al.  Accountability and Organizational Learning in the Public Sector , 2013 .

[30]  Federica Farneti,et al.  An Analysis of the Italian Governmental Guidelines and of the Local Governments’ Practices for Social Reports , 2011 .

[31]  J. Guthrie,et al.  Gri Sustainability Reporting Guidelines For Public And Third Sector Organizations , 2010 .

[32]  Amanda Sinclair,et al.  The chameleon of accountability: Forms and discourses , 1995 .

[33]  Jeffrey Unerman,et al.  Integrated Reporting: Insights, gaps and an agenda for future research , 2014 .

[34]  P. Biancone,et al.  The Popular Financial Reporting: Focus on Stakeholders—The first European Experience , 2016 .

[35]  Sunny Marche,et al.  E-Government and E-Governance: The Future Isn't What It Used To Be , 2009 .

[36]  M. I. B. Alijarde.  The Usefulness of Financial Reporting in Spanish Local Governments , 1997 .

[37]  L. Bartocci,et al.  Towards Integrated Reporting in the Public Sector , 2013 .

[38]  Sandra Cohen,et al.  Tracing the Future of Reporting in the Public Sector: Introducing Integrated Popular Reporting , 2015 .

[39]  R. Gray.  Is accounting for sustainability actually accounting for sustainability…and how would we know? An exploration of narratives of organisations and the planet , 2010 .

[40]  Laura Rocca,et al.  Ex-Ante Impact Assessment of Sustainability Information–The Directive 2014/95 , 2018 .

[41]  M. López-Pérez,et al.  Current Trends in Research on Social Responsibility in State-Owned Enterprises: A Review of the Literature from 2000 to 2017 , 2018, Sustainability.

[42]  K. Jacobs.  Theorising Interdisciplinary Public Sector Accounting Research , 2016 .

[43]  R. Scapens,et al.  Accounting systems and systems of accountability — understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts , 1985 .

[44]  J. Yusuf,et al.  Popular Financial Reports as Fiscal Transparency Mechanisms: An Assessment Using the Fiscal Transparency Index for the Citizen User , 2017 .

[45]  I. Brusca,et al.  Harmonizing public sector accounting in Europe: thinking out of the box , 2016 .

[46]  S. Veltri,et al.  The Free State University integrated reporting: a critical consideration , 2015 .

[47]  Gabriel A. Almond,et al.  Political Theory and Political Science , 1966, American Political Science Review.

[48]  J. Guthrie,et al.  Integrated reporting and integrated thinking in Italian public sector organisations , 2017 .

[49]  J. Yusuf,et al.  What citizens want to know about their government's finances: Closing the information gap , 2016 .

[50]  J. Guthrie,et al.  Social reports in Italian universities: disclosures and preparers’ perspective , 2016 .

[51]  F. Fusco,et al.  What is the stock of the situation? A bibliometric analysis on social and environmental accounting research in public sector , 2019, International Journal of Public Sector Management.

[52]  Robert W. Scapens,et al.  Accountability and Accountable Management in the UK Public Sector , 1993 .

[53]  Jonas Gerdin,et al.  Exploiting institutional contradictions: The role of management accounting in continuous improvement implementation , 2006 .

[54]  J. Yusuf,et al.  For the People: Popular Financial Reporting Practices of Local Governments , 2013 .

[55]  Irvine Lapsley,et al.  The diffusion of management accounting innovations in the public sector: a research agenda , 2004 .