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

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This paper aims to examine how the adoption of a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system challenges the definition of the expertise and roles of accountants within organizations, leading to new, hybrid positions. By drawing on structuration theory, we propose to conceptualize the potential change in accountants' practices and positions as a structuration process, and ERP systems as modalities of structuration, providing new interpretive schemes, norms and co-ordination and control facilities, which influence the direction of hybridization between accountants and other professional groups. Since the results of this process are neither predictable a priori, nor generalizable, we are convinced that detailed interpretive case studies of ERP implementations are needed to understand their complex impacts on accountants. Hence, we provide one such study in order to explore the 'ambiguous' and often inconsistent consequences for accountants deriving from the adoption of an ERP system.

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