Human capital disclosures in Swedish state-owned enterprises - a comparison of integrated reporting versus traditional reporting

Rimmel, G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9055-950X (2018) Human capital disclosures in Swedish state-owned enterprises - a comparison of integrated reporting versus traditional reporting. In: Arvidsson, S. (ed.) Challenges in Managing Sustainable Business: Reporting, Taxation, Ethics and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 55-75. ISBN 9783319932651 doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-93266-8

Abstract/Summary

During the past 20 years, corporate social reporting has made a journey from being a niche reporting product by few green companies into the mainstream norm in corporate reporting, as more than 90% of all Swedish companies do report about sustainability by providing information on environmental, social and financial resources. Employees are often regarded as the companies’ most valuable resource. Nowadays, businesses tend to report about their human capital by including voluntary disclosures in corporate reports. Thus, the more recent problem stems in what to include and how to display it. To assist corporations, reporting frameworks from the Global reporting initiative (GRI) or International integrated reporting council (IIRC) gained popularity. By specifically addressing that human capital is one of the core capitals, the IIRC inevitably bring the reporting of human capital on the corporate reporting agenda. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight on how Swedish state-owned enterprises make disclosures about human capital in their corporate reports. Furthermore, this study aims to map potential patterns and dissimilarities in respect to the application of integrated reporting in comparison to traditional corporate reporting. This exploratory study uses a disclosure index based on the GRI framework to collect the data. The results show that the SOEs applying integrated reporting tend to disclose more about employees than enterprises that follow traditional corporate reporting.

Item Type	Book or Report Section
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/80626
Identification Number/DOI	10.1007/978-3-319-93266-8
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Henley Business School > Business Informatics, Systems and Accounting
Uncontrolled Keywords	Integrated reporting, Human capital, Corporate reporting, State-owned companies, Sweden
Publisher	Palgrave Macmillan
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