Purpose This study aims to verify whether non-financial disclosure in the construction industry (CI) responds to stakeholders’ information needs and explores the most frequent topics disclosed in terms of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) pillars. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a bag-of-words method and latent Dirichlet allocation to match stakeholders’ expectations with information disclosed by companies. This paper assesses the publicly available non-financial disclosure of the 46 European CI companies covered by the Refinitiv database with ESG scores. Findings This study provides two main findings. First, it shows the mismatch between stakeholders’ information needs and what they get in non-financial reporting. Despite non-financial information in CI disclosure, the information disclosed by many CI companies does not meet their users’ information needs. CI companies commonly focus on their sustainable products and health policy while omitting other topics of interest – the circular economy, unethical business behaviour, migrant policy and human trafficking. Second, this study indicates the defects of simple disclosure analysis based on keywords and highlights the importance of context in information analysis. Practical implications The proposed novel approach to text analysis offers several practical applications. It is a more effective tool for evaluating companies’ sustainability performance. It may be especially important to ESG rating providers. Additionally, the results may be of interest to companies wishing to improve their communication, and, in particular, to regulators and standard setters in two matters. The first is the need for more pressure to increase awareness among issuers to shift from disclosing large amounts of non-financial information to disclosing good quality non-financial information, which would be appropriate for meeting stakeholders’ expectations. The second is the necessity for deepening issuers’ understanding of the diverse stakeholders’ information needs, considering the substantial differences among industries and improving communication to meet them. Originality/value This study introduces text analysis that, apart from keywords, considers the context of these keywords’ appearances in a report’s narration. It allows a significantly improved understanding of the information disclosed and a more stable grounding for reasoning, leading to better and informed decisions. Moreover, this study verifies how the information disclosed matches stakeholders’ needs. Finally, it enriches the literature on sectoral analysis concerning non-financial disclosure.

In recent years, the construction industry faced major challenges in ensuring a balance between environmental, economic, and social aspects. There are a lot of different studies on different aspects of the construction industry. Most of the available studies look at the construction supervision process mainly from the constructor’s point of view. However, there is little research on the market surveillance and supervision process performed by the government and its role in ensuring sustainability in a particular area. The aim of this study was to identify the main activities within the construction supervision process to achieve the sustainability of construction. The theoretical framework of the concept of sustainability in construction and in the activities of the supervision process was analyzed on the basis of a literature survey. The research revealed a connection between sustainability elements and the construction supervision activities. The results of the survey identified the most important factors that influence, negatively as well as positively, the achievements of sustainability in the supervision process. The research results are significant in order to create a construction supervision process which would not only ensure the compliance with the set requirements but also help achieve sustainability in the particular area. Research Limitations/Implications: Research is focused on the supervision process of public building construction in Latvia.

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