Tales in two countries: An insight into corporate environmental reporting in Denmark and the UK

Abstract

The 1992 EC Fifth Action Plan, ‘Towards Sustainability’, expresses the Commission's commitment to ‘sustainable growth’. Detailed in the plan are requirements and areas of improvement which relate, predominantly, to environmental management. However, financial and environmental management conflict in important and fundamental areas. A failure of management practice and European policy to identify and address this conflict will not only prolong the ecological inefficiencies of industry but will isolate intent and action. This study examines this conflict with respect to training, operational time‐horizons, opportunity costs, corporate governance and growth. The Annual Report is the authoritative statement of corporate performance, policy, objectives and culture. Although most reports do provide a broad if summary coverage of the main business activities, such reports are dominated by the needs of financial management. Extensive legislation and professional edicts dictate the contents of these financial reports. From the perspective of the Annual Report, it is a reasonable conclusion that financial performance is a part of whatever constitutes the core values of corporations. From this same perspective, it is also reasonable to infer that in many corporations environmental performance is not a part of corporate core values. This study compares and contrasts the Annual Reports of six environmentally significant companies in Denmark and the UK. The British environmental reports studied are thorough but separate from the Annual Report. On the other hand, the Danish firms incorporate all their environmental reporting within their Annual Reports. Which gives a better expression of a change in corporate core values?.

Corporate Responsibility Reporting and its Determinants in Comparative Perspective – a Review of the Empirical Literature and a Meta‐analysis

“…Perrini (), on the contrary, examined responsibility reporting by European companies without differentiating between their countries of origin because he assumed ‘a strong uniformity in how they report their CSR activities’ (p. 612). A small‐scale two‐country study was done by Birkin and Jorgensen (), who looked at the environmental reporting of six businesses from the UK and Denmark and detected national differences in disclosure, but did not attribute these to specific causes. Small exploratory studies on two north‐western European countries were also conducted by Adams and Kuasirikun () and Adams (), who looked at large multinational companies in the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors of the UK and Germany, and concluded that reporting depended on the country of origin.…”

The Ecological Accountant: From the Cogito to Thinking Like a Mountain

“…Appropriate methodologies here would include mass-or eco-balance accounts and environmental impact appraisal . Gray (1992Gray ( , 1993 and Owen (1992) have reviewed the way forward for accounting in these respects and several companies are putting these ideas into practise (Birkin and Jorgensen , 1994b) .…”

Focus and Standardization of Sustainability Reporting – A Comparative Study of the United Kingdom and Finland

“…The differences between the UK and Finland in terms of reporting raise the assumption that cultural and socio‐economic factors that vary from country to country have an impact on reporting practices. There are several studies that have pointed out a variation of reporting practices across countries (Gray et al ., ; Guthrie and Parker, ; Roberts, ; Birkin and Jorgensen, ; Halme and Huse, ; Lober et al ., ; Adams et al ., ; Adams and Kuasirikun, ; Bartolomeo et al ., ; Kolk et al ., ; Adams, ; Morhardt et al ., ; Maignan and Ralston, ; Holland and Foo, ; Kolk, ; Cormier et al ., ; Chapple and Moon, ; Meek et al ., ; Kolk, ; Smith et al ., ; Hartman et al ., ; Kolk, ; Tsang et al ., ; Chen and Bouvain, ; Morhardt, ).…”