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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which social, ethical and environmental (SEE) disclosure is being integrated into institutional investment. The aim is also to investigate the interplay between private and public SEE disclosure.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses a grounded theory methodology involving interviews with 21 members of the UK institutional adjustment community.FindingsThe paper found that institutional investors did not consider that public SEE disclosure was adequate for their portfolio investment decisions, suggesting that SEE disclosure was decision‐useful. Consequently, this perceived market failure in public SEE disclosure has been supplemented by the development of sophisticated private SEE disclosure channels. Further, the interviews indicated that this private SEE disclosure process was becoming dialogic in nature, since not only were institutional investors initiating the engagement process with companies but also companies were starting to request information on the SEE disclosure required by institutional investors. This finding contrasts with previous work which found that the private disclosure process in financial reporting was essentially user‐oriented and uni‐directional.Originality/valueThis paper highlights the importance of SEE disclosure to a crucial user group, institutional investors. The research contributes to the SEE disclosure literature by revealing details of the evolving private SEE disclosure process for the first time.

The year 2000 saw the launch of AA1000, a standard designed to enable corporate ethical performance to be judged. If such ethical performance is interpreted as social and environmental behaviour our view is that it should lead to more social and environmental disclosure. Yet the willingness to communicate corporate social and environmental performance still seems to be limited. Of the social and environmental disclosures that exist many appear to be rather fragmented and disparate. In this paper we explore the apparent paradox between concern for the environment and the limited amount of corporate environmental disclosure (CED) that takes place. Through an empirical study, the incentives and disincentives for CED are identified. Findings from the study identify a difference between the information requirements of ‘users’ and the willingness of ‘preparers’ to provide. The paper makes some tentative policy suggestions with the intention of bringing the two parties closer together. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -This paper aims to explore the nature of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, which takes place in one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and their investee companies. Design/methodology/approach -Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives from 20 UK investment institutions to derive data which was then coded and analysed, in order to derive a picture of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, using an interpretive methodological approach, in addition to explorative analysis using NVivo software. Findings -The authors find that private climate change reporting is dominated by a discourse of risk and risk management. This emerging risk discourse derives from institutional investors' belief that climate change represents a material risk, that it is the most salient sustainability issue, and that their clients require them to manage climate change-related risk within their portfolio investment. It is found that institutional investors are using the private reporting process to compensate for the acknowledged inadequacies of public climate change reporting. Contrary to evidence indicating corporate capture of public sustainability reporting, these findings suggest that the emerging private climate change reporting discourse is being captured by the institutional investment community. There is also evidence of an emerging discourse of opportunity in private climate change reporting as the institutional investors are increasingly aware of a range of ways in which climate change presents material opportunities for their investee companies to exploit. Lastly, the authors find an absence of any ethical discourse, such that private climate change reporting reinforces rather than challenges the "business case" status quo. Originality/value -Although there is a wealth of sustainability reporting research, there is no academic research on private climate change reporting. This paper attempts to fill this gap by providing rich interview evidence regarding the nature of the emerging private climate change reporting discourse.