Sustainability reporting nexus to corporate governance in scholarly literature

  • Received September 10, 2022;
    Accepted October 13, 2022;
    Published October 19, 2022
  • Author(s)
  • DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.21511/ee.13(1).2022.06
  • Article Info
    Volume 13 2022, Issue #1, pp. 61-78
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Sustainability reporting has become a practice of the majority and is decided by boards of directors as the supreme governing body in the decision-making process of companies. The paper provides a high-view picture and visualizes research to portray the historical shifts in sustainability reporting nexus to corporate governance through an analysis utilizing CiteSpace software on 935 articles published in Web of Science Core Collection from 2009 to 2021.
The number of papers in the area has expanded, especially since 2013 (a branching point), while the study determines a type of bifurcation spot (the year 2017) that evinces the SR-CG field maturity. The study determined the dominant countries through affiliated to them researchers (the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, China and Australia), the most esteemed journals (Journal of Business Ethics, Business Strategy and the Environment and Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal), and the major co-occurrence of hot keywords (carbon disclosure project, environmental disclosure quality, integrated reporting, financial performance, foreign director, environmental reporting, public sector, sustainability assurance statement).
The paper identifies principal issues where SR-CG research lags (dearth of those research in developing economies and geographical limitation of research) and unravels uncharted so far domains (jurisdictions-related studies) in the realm. Future research in the realm is likely to focus on ESG, disclosures and governance performance, as well as on specific areas (geography, industry, etc.), and will explore in depth the role of multiple factors together. This papers indicate the growing convergence between SR and CG in literature, and given predominance of ‘SR as a function of CG’ approach a more stalwart and sound CG framework could bring about more tenable SR practices. The paper puts forward an agenda for advancing forthcoming research in the realm of SR-CG interdependence.

Acknowledgment
This paper is co-funded by European Union through the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) within the project “EU BEST PRACTICE OF LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT, SOCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL ACCOUNTING AND SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING” 101047667 — EULASTING — ERASMUS-JMO-2021-HEI-TCH-RSCH https://bit.ly/3Bbvquw

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    • Figure 1. Summary of the overall research methodology employed
    • Figure 2. Number of publications (2009–2021) forming the studies’ sample
    • Figure 3. Number of articles in each country
    • Figure 4. Co-Cited journal
    • Figure 5. Map of articles published by institutions
    • Figure 6. Co-Cited article map
    • Figure 7. Keyword clustering map
    • Table 1. Inclusion and exclusion criteria of sample selection
    • Table 2. The search formula used in the study
    • Table 3. Top 20 countries in the number of articles
    • Table 4. Statistics of cited journals
    • Table 5. Number of articles published by authors
    • Table 6. Statistics of the number of references cited
    • Table 7. Keyword clustering results
    • Table 8. Future research directions
    • Table A1. Statistics on the number of articles published by institutions
    • Table B1. The top three cited and three papers with the highest Burst value
    • Conceptualization
      Oleh Pasko
    • Investigation
      Oleh Pasko, Fuli Chen, Tetyana Kuts, Inna Sharko, Natalia Ryzhikova
    • Methodology
      Oleh Pasko, Tetyana Kuts
    • Project administration
      Oleh Pasko, Fuli Chen
    • Supervision
      Oleh Pasko
    • Visualization
      Oleh Pasko, Fuli Chen, Natalia Ryzhikova
    • Writing – original draft
      Oleh Pasko, Fuli Chen
    • Writing – review & editing
      Oleh Pasko
    • Data curation
      Fuli Chen, Tetyana Kuts
    • Formal Analysis
      Fuli Chen, Inna Sharko, Natalia Ryzhikova
    • Validation
      Tetyana Kuts, Inna Sharko, Natalia Ryzhikova