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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Habiba Al-ShaerORCiD
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Elseiver, 2022.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
We explore Landrum and Ohsowski (2018)’s development model, which positions each company’s sustainability reporting with multiple worldviews of corporate sustainability. We investigate the impact of sustainability report communicative actions on corporate sustainability performance. We argue that companies that comply with the reporting guidelines and adopt the business case for corporate sustainability may not capture all sustainability aspects, and therefore may not have a real impact on sustainability performance. Employing a computer-based textual analysis on a sample of UK firms that published sustainability reports during the period 2014-2018, we find that sustainability reports that communicate the message that firms understand sustainability to mean maintaining production and consumption patterns within resources capacity of the planet and coexisting in harmony with nature are likely to have a positive effect on sustainability performance. On the other hand, communicating compliance and the business-centred approach as their understanding of sustainability will negatively affect sustainability performance. Our findings offer important implications for companies who need to change their approach towards sustainability reporting and shift from the business case approach to advance to the next stage of sustainability reporting which should guide corporate decisions and actions.
Author(s): Al-Shaer H, Hussainey K
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: The Journal of Environmental Management
Year: 2022
Volume: 311
Print publication date: 01/06/2022
Online publication date: 11/03/2022
Acceptance date: 08/03/2022
Date deposited: 08/03/2022
ISSN (print): 0301-4797
ISSN (electronic): 1095-8630
Publisher: Elseiver
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114883
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.114883
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/v140-2k15
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