Corporate Social Responsibility+Intellectual Capital=Integrated Reporting?

摘要

A company is an open social system which implies a set of responsibilities as a result of the interaction with different agents. The creation of wealth cannot be the only company objective. Today, a company must be capable of maximizing its performance taken different external groups of stakeholders into account. In order to meet these demands, companies are providing both financial and non-financial information in traditional accounting statements. Even though it is not obliged, they provide additional information in other types of statements such as a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report or an Intellectual Capital (IC) statement. Since the profit maximizing aspect of a company, a cost-benefit calculus will be performed to weigh the benefits of this voluntary disclosure with the associated estimated costs. Therefore, only a limited number of companies will produce both reports. In order to reduce corporate communication costs, one could wonder whether it is not possible to produce one report taken CSR and IC visions into account. Should IC advocates work together with CSR advocates in order to start converting both visions into one set of guidelines to decrease the company's communication load? Although integrating these reports would result in a more efficient allocation of corporate means, to our knowledge not a lot of research has been performed on combining these two research areas. We provide the reader with a literature review on the reasons why companies should disclose CSR or IC information. Next, we examine initiatives that have been made in the past to produce uniform guidelines in order to increase the comparability of CSR and IC reports. Finally, we provide a framework combining both IC and CSR elements.