From ivory tower to a storyteller of value creation: integrated reporting at Japanese and South African universities

Abstract

PurposeThe paper examines integrated reporting (IR) practices of two Japanese universities and three South African universities by evaluating and comparing their 2019 integrated reports.Design/methodology/approachA multiple case study research method is used in this study.FindingsThe paper reveals that IR is in its infancy at the sample universities. Some universities have initiated disclosing information to their stakeholders on how they create value. However, the universities lack a comprehensive approach to integrating financial and non-financial information, thereby affecting the IR disclosure quality. The findings indicate that informal coercive pressure of South African universities is a primary driving factor that enables the universities to achieve a higher IR disclosure quality than their Japanese counterparts.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper argues that institutional theory is relevant for explaining the differences in IR practices of the universities in the two different jurisdictional settings.Practical implicationsThe research will be of interest to university administrators, policymakers, regulators and other stakeholder groups of universities. The assessment of integrated reports serves as a first step to help the universities improve IR practices as well as to facilitate the diffusion of IR in higher education institutions (HEIs) globally. There is also a need for universities to pay more attention to the storytelling of their value creation in future IR disclosures.Originality/valueIt is the first to assess the IR quality of the Japanese sample universities as well as the first to conduct a comparative analysis for IR practices of universities in two different jurisdictional settings that have adopted IR. The findings of this study add to the current scholarly debate on universities' ability to tell their stories on their value creation to stakeholders via integrated reports.

Quality of integrated reports: evidence from Brazilian public universities

“…Data was not forward-looking, information was not linked, stakeholder relationships were not highlighted and organizational capacity to create value was not disclosed. Sun et al (2022) in addition to considering the South African context, they considered the Japanese context. The authors examined the IR practices of two Japanese universities and three South African universities, evaluating and comparing their 2019 IR.…”

Towards achieving SDGs through integrated reporting in Malaysian public universities

“…The review demonstrates the concepts of integrated thinking, strategic decision-making and value creation, driven by the public with the <IR> production by HEIs (Mauro et al , 2020; Fissi et al , 2021; Aras et al , 2021). Furthermore, the institutional theory is adapted in the above studies, such as Hassan et al (2019), who examined UK HEIs and a comparative study on the <IR> quality of South African and Japanese universities by Sun et al (2022). Other studies on <IR> in HEIs included the context of European markets, such as Spain, Italy and Turkey.…”

“…The disclosure level of <IR> content elements is yet to be examined in the annual reports of HEIs in Malaysia, primarily based on the institutional theory following Hassan et al (2019) and Sun et al (2022). This literature review reveals that most studies examined <IR> content elements in annual reports, which are unnecessarily called integrated reporting.…”

“…There is an ongoing debate on the HEIs’ ability to tell their value-creation stories via integrated reports (Sun et al , 2022). In this sense, two Japanese and three South African universities were compared in terms of their <IR>-related disclosures based on the 2019 integrated reports.…”

“…As a developing country that strives to put its universities on the global map, Malaysia differs from the context of western countries. Our study addresses this gap by extending the examination of <IR> disclosure level in the annual reports of HEIs in the UK (Hassan et al , 2019), the study of <IR> of HEIs in Europe (Brusca et al , 2018; Iacuzzi et al , 2020; Mauro et al , 2020; Aras et al , 2021) and the recent comparison of <IR> of South African and Japanese universities (Sun et al , 2022). The current study examines the disclosure of <IR> content elements in the annual reports of Malaysian public universities (MPUs) following Hassan et al ’s (2019) approach.…”