This article investigates the dynamics of benchmarking in municipal water utilities. The authors explain how a voluntary project developed the characteristics of compulsory benchmarking. While the first adopters of benchmarking sought efficiency gains, later adoptions have mainly been driven by...

The paper seeks to shed more light on how businesses have used the language of sustainability in their disclosures. The study employs interpretive textual analysis and takes a closer look at how the corporate talk of sustainability has developed in the disclosures of three major Finnish...

Sustainability discourse is becoming ubiquitous. Still, a significant gap persists between corporate sustainability talk and practice. Prior research on corporate sustainability reporting has relied primarily on two competing theoretical framings, signaling theory and legitimacy theory, which...

The popularity of fair trade is growing swiftly in many parts of the world. As the fair trade market has grown, new kinds of participant have emerged and the field has become increasingly commercialized. However, there are also tensions between the different groups as to whether...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed further light on how corporate environmental disclosures are used to respond to institutional pressures stemming from the social context. Design/methodology/approach – Interpretive textual analysis is applied to discuss how the environmental...