Content Analysis in Environmental Reporting Research: Enrichment and Rehearsal of the Method in a British-German Context

This paper provides a critical review of content analysis studies of social and environmental reporting and proposes to advance the rigour and usefulness of this popular technique. The authors identify two different approaches to content analysis: mechanistic approaches and interpretative analysis. According to the authors, mechanistic content analysis is dominant in social and environmental accounting and has a number of weaknesses. Consequently, the authors introduce a new content analytic method called consolidated narrative interrogation, which seeks to combine a mechanistic approach with something similar to a form of close reading. To support this method, data were collected from 14 paired companies in the UK and Germany, matched for size and industry in ten different sectors. To analyse the data, three coding steps were employed, namely: a qualitative coding of content diversity; coding on an information content scale; a quantitative volumetric measurement. The authors conclude that the more advanced method of content analysis developed in the paper produces a wider range of replicable insights into disclosure which may enrich our interpretations of environmental reporting. The paper attempts to advance a method for the analysis of environmental reporting and, in this respect, makes a valuable contribution to the literature. However, there is perhaps some scope for the authors’ to delineate how consolidated narrative interrogation relates (or interacts) with recent discourse-based studies in social and environmental accounting and to further articulate the theoretical aspects of their framework.