Dissertation Daniela Woschnack

Corporate accountability: A sociological view on the narratives of corporate accountability in the area of non-financial disclosure

My empirical study deals with narratives of corporations’ accountability in the area of non-financial disclosure. Corporations and the society are interlinked in various ways. While corporations have extensive impacts on stakeholder and societal interests, they are confronted with social demands. Therefore, I shed light on the question: How and why do corporations assess themselves as accountable for non-financial disclosure?

Following the new sociological institutionalism, corporations have to gain social legitimacy by balancing out the social demands they are confronted with and the socially accepted rules, values and norms with their daily operations. If corporations would not or cannot balance out these elements they lose social legitimacy and gain legal, economic or other social sanctions. Non-financial disclosure is one way for corporations to meet social demands and gain social legitimacy but although the disclosure of non-financial information rose from a minor matter to an issue on corporations’ agenda in the last decades, the field is still in its infancy. Next to several initiatives which try to establish frameworks to standardize the reporting of non-financial information, especially corporations play an important role in defining and shaping the field of corporate accountability in the area of non-financial disclosure. Therefore, we need further research to better understand the field of corporate accountability -  and thus, the field of sustainability.

My empirical analysis is mainly based on interviews with corporations and further relevant actors like audit and consulting firms, sustainability accounting initiatives and sustainability rating agencies. Whereas the German corporate landscape is characterized by a specific structure with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as largest group, I have interviewed a wide range of different corporations. I have analysed all interviews by using qualitative content analysis to reproduce different narratives of corporate accountability in the area of non-financial disclosure.