Linking environmental activity and environmental disclosure in an organisational change framework

Over the past decades, a plethora of papers have been written describing organisations' reaction to pressure on them to change their practices regarding the natural environment. These papers can broadly be classified into two groups, those research papers interested in organisations' activities and strategies to deal with environmental issues, and those concerned with the external reporting or disclosure of information regarding organisations' effects on the environment. What appears to be missing in this research is very much detailed analysis of the link between these two areas. This paper aims to address this issue.

This paper, while calling for empirical work to be carried out to investigate this link further, discusses the assumptions made about this link in previous research and then theorises what our expectations for this link might look like given our current knowledge of reporting practices, and the abundance of reporting frameworks and guidelines that currently exist.

The paper augments a model developed by Gray et al. in 1995 that suggests a hierarchy of responses to environmental pressures, within the context of organisational change. The augmentation adds an accounting element to the model by considering the reporting that organizations may undertake depending on their location in the change process.

The model provides a basis for investigation of the link between organisational change as a result of environmental pressures, and reporting. The paper suggests a number of future research projects, using the model as a basis for empirical investigations.

This paper extends an existing model to produce a comprehensive framework that provides a basis for further investigation of the relationship between accounting (albeit a broad definition of accounting to include environmental reporting) and organisational change.