From conformance to performance: The corporate responsibilities continuum

This paper presents a frame of reference for conceptualising connected reporting issues given the growing range of corporate requirements and stakeholder responsibilities facing organizations today. A notional continuum for locating corporate financial reporting (CFR) and corporate governance (CG) responsibilities alongside potential corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting and stakeholder value creation (SVC) requirements is developed. The urgency for such an integrative perspective arises from the swiftly expanding scholarly research relating to corporate responsibilities. These academic exhortations are framed as inert and independent domains of discourse, given the absence of a wider connecting framework, to link what are in effect, closely related issues. The broad argument advanced is that CFR, CG, CSR, and SVC need to be notionally integrated into a spectrum of corporate disclosure responsibility, so that debates on conformance and performance reporting issues can be articulated in a comprehensively interlinked manner rather than disparately. The paper also addresses issues relating to the mandatory reporting, articulation and promulgation of CSR and SVC standards, in the light of the notional continuum posited. Some implications of the continuum are discussed, including the need to qualify calls which have been made in the recent past for differentiating between financial and management accounting practices.