Sustainability bonuses

Companies in a range of sectors must comply with a series of minimum CSR standards as a condition of being in business, or staying in business, and rightly earn little in the way of moral credit for doing so. However, where others are making a name for themselves by going further than required, should they be regarded as somehow morally superior

Causes and Consequences of Choosing Different Assurance Providers: An International Study of Sustainability Reporting

An increasing number of companies voluntary disclose information about their social and environment performance in sustainability reports. This study investigates the causes and consequences of choosing different assurance providers for companies seeking independent verification of their sustainability reports. We employ a logistical regression analysis from an international sample of 136 companies to document that companies domiciled in countries with a weaker governance system are more likely to choose a big-4 accounting firm as assurance provider. We additionally examine the association between the type of assurance provider and the quality of a sustainability assurance statement. Using a content analysis based on an existing framework (O'Dwyer and Owen, 2005), we provide evidence that big-4 accounting firms positively affect assurance quality in terms of reporting format and assurance procedures. In contrast, the quality of the recommendations and opinions in a sustainability assurance statement is positively associated with non-accounting assurance providers

Determinants of Conflict Minerals Disclosure

This paper examines conflict minerals disclosure (CMD) as mandated by the Dodd–Frank Act. We rely on a thorough content analysis conducted by the Responsible Sourcing Network on a sample of 122 firms that filed CMDs with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015. We document that firms with long‐term oriented incentives, a greater number of board meetings, strong corporate governance systems and inclusion in a sustainability index are associated with higher levels of CMD. Our results suggest that in the presence of enforcement leniency, both internal and external firm‐specific factors affect strategic (non‐)compliance with a mandatory social disclosure regime. We provide implications for supply chain managers, corporate reporters and policy‐makers involved in the adoption of responsible sourcing strategies. © 2018 The Authors. Business Strategy and The Environment published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Lt

A lot of icing but little cake?:taking integrated reporting forward

Integrated reporting has fast emerged as a new accounting practice to help firms understand how they create value and be able to effectively communicate this to external stakeholders. While insightful experiences from the early-adopters of integrated reporting start to accumulate, the development of the field and how integrated reporting may be successfully implemented remains challenging and contested. Several issues are still controversial with no consensus reached on the central purpose about integrated reporting. This paper relies upon a qualitative approach to accomplish two objectives. First, we provide a review of the embryonic academic literature in the integrated reporting field in order to summarize extant knowledge. Second, in response to a gap in the literature on managerial perceptions concerning integrated reporting, we present the sensemaking approaches of three key experts impacting integrated reporting practices at the global level using semi-structured interviews. Our findings suggest that experts perceive the field to be fragmented and believe that most companies currently have weak understanding of the business value of integrated reporting. The experts give insights into how they perceive the field to be progressing despite challenges and on where they see improvements in the diffusion of practices in integrated reporting. Our study contributes to this special issue by reframing the existing implementation challenges of integrated reporting into promising and inclusive research opportunities that align the priorities of both academia and business

Saying more with less? Disclosure conciseness, completeness and balance in Integrated Reports

The Integrated Reporting Framework of 2013 represents the latest international attempt to connect a firm’s financial and sustainability (i.e., environmental, social and governance) performance in one company report. An Integrated Report (IR) should communicate “concisely” about how a firm’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects, in the context of its external environment, lead to the creation of sustainable value. At the same time, an IR needs to be “complete and balanced”, i.e., broadly including all material matters, both positive and negative, in a balanced way. Drawing on impression management studies, we examine a selection of performance determinants to gain insights into the factors associated with conciseness, completeness and balance in IR. The results from a sample of IR early adopters show that in the presence of a firm’s weak financial performance, the IR tends to be significantly longer and less readable (i.e., less concise), and more optimistic (i.e., less balanced). We additionally find that firms with worse social performance provide reports that are foggier (i.e., less concise) and with less information on their sustainability performance (i.e., less complete). Our evidence implies that IR early adopters employ quantity and syntactical reading ease manipulation as well as thematic content and verbal tone manipulation as impression management strategies. The results also suggest that such strategies depend not only on the level of firms’ performance but also on the type of performance (financial versus nonfinancial/sustainability). This paper adds to the limited literature on IR in sustainability accounting as well as to the research in mainstream financial accounting that examines disclosure quality using textual analysis

Planetary boundaries and corporate sustainability

Real intellectual innovation happens when multi-disciplinary researchers get together and collaborate. And innovation is urgently needed, if we are to take corporate sustainability to the next level. Supporting this shift, nine ‘Planetary Boundaries’ have been identified by natural scientists, defining the parameters of a safe environment for humanity

Method for Wearable Kinematic Gait Analysis Using a Harmonic Oscillator Applied to the Center of Mass

A model based on a harmonic oscillator describing human walking and balance with the sinusoidal trajectory of the center of mass of a subject during gait is presented. This model allows overcoming the traditional drift due to the double integration of raw acceleration data. The protocol uses a single 3D accelerometer worn at the pelvis level. The system computes the spatiotemporal gait and balance parameters when the subject is walking with or without aids. An incremental methodological approach is proposed and followed in the implementation and accuracy assessment. Eleven healthy subjects have participated to the study performing 6 trials over a fixed linear walking path at a self-selected speed. For reference, the protocol has imposed the execution of 52 steps whose length has been fixed at 60 cm. Different processing methods have been implemented and tested. The model identifies steps, walking time, and stepping frequency with an excellent reliability (absolute percentage accuracy error < 5%). When the information about the expected step length is given to the model, the percentage error in the measure of walking distance and speed is 3.25%. Without this input, this error rises to 4.95%, while for the anthropometric method is 3.68%

Defining Requirements and Related Methods for Designing Sensorized Garments

Designing smart garments has strong interdisciplinary implications, specifically related to user and technical requirements, but also because of the very different applications they have: medicine, sport and fitness, lifestyle monitoring, workplace and job conditions analysis, etc. This paper aims to discuss some user, textile, and technical issues to be faced in sensorized clothes development. In relation to the user, the main requirements are anthropometric, gender-related, and aesthetical. In terms of these requirements, the user’s age, the target application, and fashion trends cannot be ignored, because they determine the compliance with the wearable system. Regarding textile requirements, functional factors—also influencing user comfort—are elasticity and washability, while more technical properties are the stability of the chemical agents’ effects for preserving the sensors’ efficacy and reliability, and assuring the proper duration of the product for the complete life cycle. From the technical side, the physiological issues are the most important: skin conductance, tolerance, irritation, and the effect of sweat and perspiration are key factors for reliable sensing. Other technical features such as battery size and duration, and the form factor of the sensor collector, should be considered, as they affect aesthetical requirements, which have proven to be crucial, as well as comfort and wearability