Coping with Integrated Reporting: An Overview of Financial and Social Reporting Using the Integrated Approach

Integrated reporting in its current form has been part of corporate reporting for nearly one decade. As implied above, this is another welcomed development in corporate social responsibility. Having said this, a number of interesting questions which our readers might want to ask have come to our minds, let’s put forward some of them. Are we now the less or more wiser since these better reporting practices came on to the global corporate scene? What does integrated reporting really entails? How are CSR scholars and practitioners taking forward the requirements of integrated reporting around the globe? What are those corporations which have adopted the use of integrated reporting saying about it? What can we learn from organizations that have pioneered the integrated report? How does the integrated reporting process influence the corporate business model and enhance the quality of disclosure? How is non-financial information assured in the context of the <IR> Framework? What are stakehoders saying about integrated reporting? The intention of the book was to add to the discourse on Integrated Reporting by exploring different aspects and perspectives on Integrating Reporting and integrated report based on the authors’ critical perspectives, knowledge, expertise and ideas, both from fully theoretical and empirical approaches. Accordingly, these and many other relevant questions are amongst the questions many of the seventen chapters of this book provide answers to. The seventeen chapter book is divided into three parts, each part focusing of different issues relating to integrated reporting. Part I on Theoretical Insights and Outlooks on Integrated Reporting, is made up of four Chapters. Part II on Critical Perspectives on Integrated Reporting in Theory and Practice is in eight chapters. Part III on Implementing Integrated Reporting in Different Countries and Organisations: Issues, Benefits and Challenges contains five Chapters. A careful read through of all the issues explored in this introductory chapter to each of the seventeen chapters that comprise this book should hopefully reveal that Integrated Reporting is reshaping corporate disclosure practices worldwide, integrated reporting has indeed come to stay in our corporate reporting world. Companies operating in different political settings around the globe are engaging themselves in a number of activities to improve their disclosure practices with regard to both their financial and non-financial areas of their operations. Professor Judge Mervyn King the author of King III and IV Reports in South Africa has drastically reshaped how corporate entities of this era perceive, understand and go about doing what the should do in this regard. Stock Exchanges and Standard setting organizations worldwide are also driving forward activities on how companies should deal with the matter. We can only become the wiser as we move forward in reporting both financial and non-financial aspects of the organisation, readers of these reports can only find them more useful in their working day.