Despite a strong plea for integrating sustainability goals into traditional corporate bonus schemes, a comprehensive implementation of these systems has been lacking until recently. This article explores four illustrative cases from the Netherlands, where several multinationals started to...

This paper examines corporate responses to climate change in relation to the development of reporting mechanisms for greenhouse gases, more specifically carbon disclosure. It first presents some background and context on the evolution of carbon trading and disclosure, and then develops a...

The debate about global integration (standardisation) versus responsiveness (adaptation) has recently been supplemented with perspectives that emphasise regionalisation. And while the discussion has also been extended from manufacturing to services, there are specific sectors and emergent topics...

In recent years, attention for corporate governance has not only increased but the notion has also broadened considerably, and started to cover some aspects traditionally seen as being part of corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR, corporate governance and their interlink seem particularly...

While research on environmental reporting frequently includes large multinational enterprises, the number of surveys that systematically analyses a whole set of such firms, including the non-reporters, is limited - and mainly focuses on the United States. This article presents the state of...

This paper explores the factors associated with the voluntary decisions to assure social, environmental and sustainability reports. Since the market for assurance services in this area is in its formative stages, there is a limited understanding of the demand for this emergent non-financial...

In this paper we explore how multinational corporations (MNCs) adopt assurance practices to develop and sustain organizational accountability for sustainability. Using a panel of Fortune Global 250 firms over a period of ten years, we document the diffusion patterns of third-party assurance of...

In the past decade, attention to environmental (and most recently, sustainability) reporting has increased, as has the number of companies that publish such reports. This growth has raised questions about the persistence and significance of this largely voluntary corporate activity, especially...

Since the publication of the first separate environmental reports in 1989, the number of companies that has started to publish information on its environmental, social or sustainability policies and/or impacts has increased substantially. This article gives an overview of worldwide trends in the...

Against the background of critique on the negative social and environmental implications of globalisation, multinational enterprises have become active in reporting on activities undertaken to prevent these "externalities" of international trade and production. This article analyses to which...