Stakeholder engagement and dialogic accounting: empirical evidence in sustainability reporting

This study aims to explain how sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement processes serve as vehicles of dialogic accounting, a form of critical accounting that creates opportunities for stakeholders to express their opinions, and the influence of dialogic interactions on the content of sustainability reports. Content analysis is used to investigate reports published by 299 companies that have adopted Global Reporting Initiative guidelines. This article studies how organizations engage stakeholders, the categories of stakeholders that are being addressed, the methods used to support stakeholder engagement, and other features of the stakeholder engagement process. Companies that disclose stakeholder perceptions, the difficulties met in engaging stakeholders, and actions aimed at creating opportunities for different groups of stakeholders to interact were subjects of discussion in a series of semi-structured interviews that focus on dialogic accounting. Companies often commit themselves to two-way dialogue with their stakeholders, but fully developed frameworks for dialogic accounting are rare. However, signs of dialogic accounting emerged in our analysis, thus confirming that sustainability reporting can become a platform for dialogic accounting systems if stakeholder engagement is effective. Our findings contribute to the accounting literature by discussing if and how sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement can serve as vehicles of dialogic accounting. This is accomplished via a research design that is based on in-depth interviews and content analysis of various sustainability reports.