The corporate reporting landscape: a market for virtue or the virtue of marketization?

The purpose of this paper is to further elaborate on the topic of standardization bodies and standards “wars” within the “market for virtue” (Vogel, 2005). This paper is a commentary on the paper by Zinenko et al. (2015) who analyze the fit between different CSR instruments at the field and the organizational level.

This is a commentary based on secondary data analysis.

This commentary reviews the implications of Zinenko et al.’s (2015) paper for research on the CSR reporting landscape and provides some additional insights into coopetition practices and the impact on organizations. It elaborates both on the development of marketization strategies and the impact of this “marketization” on what the CSR standards were initially designed for.

This commentary provides six avenues for research, which are: coopetition between standard-setters, the influence of adopters on the development of standards, the key intermediary role of investors and analysts, the governance processes of standard-setting organizations, the role of the state in the arena of private CSR instruments and, finally, the disruption and maintenance of work linked to existing standards.