Abstract

This critical approach study examines the social and environmental disclosure (SED) between Sustainability Reporting (SR) and Integrated Reporting (IR) among European companies. This paper argues that IR abandons sustainability and might overlap with the functions of SR. The research questions are to examine the integration level of SED within SR and IR and look for the patterns and motifs from reviewing both reports. Applying the critical text analysis method, the GRI G3 guidelines were used to examine a sample of ten European companies. This method is applicable as it does not have rigid procedures to follow (Merkl-Davies et al., 2013). The reports for the selected companies must incorporate fully applied IR without producing any more SR in order to analyse the validity of the data. This study has discovered that there is less integration of SED in IR than SR. The analyses continued by reading and reviewing all reports to identify patterns and motifs. Company strategy and regulatory requirements, reporting style, the crucial issues of the materiality and the development of new sections in the reports were all explored. It is apparent that the IR approach is more towards the primary groups (investors) rather than other stakeholders, society and the environment as a whole. Hence, IR is only a mirror of sustainability for business strategy. Therefore, IR needs to engage reports with other stakeholders to sustain long-term growth.

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