The purpose of this paper is to test whether the structure of non-financial disclosure, defined as the diffusion of financial, social and environmental information as part of the dialogue between a firm and its stakeholders, reduce information asymmetry. We adopt a stakeholder view of the firm to analyze the structure of non-financial disclosure along three dimensions: non-financial disclosure depth, breadth and concentration. To operationalize the variables, we applied content analysis technique to non-financial reports released by U.S. firms included in S&P500 index over the period 2004-2014. We combined content data and Bid-Ask spread data to test our hypotheses relying on feasible least squared (FLGS) estimation method. Results show that both the level of non-financial disclosure and the breadth of stakeholder-related themes covered in the reports reduce information asymmetry. In addition, firms that are consistent in how information is distributed across the different stakeholder categories benefit from lower opacity and reduced information asymmetry. Our findings contribute to the debate on the need to move beyond a one-fits-all approach to the study of nonfinancial disclosure and its related impacts.

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Sustainability‐oriented collaboration, a heterogeneous set of formal interorganizational arrangements that vary considerably in size, membership, focus and functioning, but share the same interest in addressing sustainability challenges of public concern, is becoming a mainstay of corporate agenda setting. Yet, the more firms interact on social and environmental issues, the more the burdens and tensions of collaborating for sustainability become apparent. Research and practice increasingly question whether an alliance management capability (AMC) perspective can be adopted to explain variability in collaboration effectiveness. With the aim to investigate whether, and to what extent, existing sustainability‐oriented collaboration research integrates or challenges mainstream theory on AMC, we adopt a problematization method to unpack the root assumptions underlying the AMC construct. We find that self‐interest in economic value creation and capture, the need for homogeneity to favour knowledge accumulation and learning on alliance management, and predictable patterns of AMC deployment are consistently assumed by scholars to predict success in alliance management. Accordingly, we analyse AMC assumptions’ current integration in the study of sustainability‐oriented collaboration, conducting a systematic literature review on collaborative capabilities developed for, during and in response to sustainability challenges. In so doing, we identify what distinguishes sustainability‐oriented collaboration from mainstream strategic alliances and the related implications on the collaborative capabilities firms should develop and deploy when dealing with sustainability challenges. We elaborate on these and their implications for AMC constructs to provide a future research agenda, which integrates further theoretical perspectives and broadens the scope of existing ones.

Purpose of the paper:The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of firm sustainability orientation, defined as the overall proactive strategic stance of firms toward the integration of environmental and social concerns and practices into their strategic and operational activities, on its propensity of making alliances.Methodology: We validate our arguments using panel data on 10.509 unique firm-year observations over the period 2003-2017. Findings: We find support for our baseline hypothesis: sustainability orientation has a positive impact on alliance formation. Additionally, we find that the hypothesized relationship is stronger for firms with lower expected value creation and for those that operate in opaque contexts.Research limits: Our work represents an initial attempt to investigate the role of firm sustainability orientation in explaining firm alliance propensity. In so doing, we adopted a firm level perspective assuming alliance counterparts to be homogeneous, which represents the main limitation of this study. Other limitations, as well as topics for future research are discussed in the last section.Practical implications: Our arguments and findings emphasize the critical role played by the way in which the firm manages the network of relationships in which it is embedded, in addition to the considerations about the type of relationship a firm owns that have been widely analysed. In particular, our study contributes to obtain a deeper understanding of the benefits of a stakeholder-oriented approach, which remains fundamental to encourage managers to adopt stakeholder theory practices in their behaviour. Originality of the paper:To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first attempt to study the relationship between firm sustainability orientation and its alliance propensity.

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