Hur förklaras nordiska detaljhandelsföretags arbete med hållbarhetsredovisning?

Abstract

Since the publication of sustainability reports is becoming more common, with the knowledge that there is a voluntary act for any company other than the state-owned, you can ask yourself: why do companies choose companies that sustainability reporting?

How can this be when ordinary consumers are not interested in a company's annual sustainability report which is usually published in companies’ annual reports? One possible reason for the company sustainability reports is that they are out to show social responsibility, but at the same time, research shows that consumers do not read corporate reports. Therefore we asked: How to explain Nordic retail firms work with sustainability?

The purpose of this study is to explain the scope and content of information published by retail companies, depending on size, industry, profitability, ownership structure and ownership identity.

Of the 58 companies examined in this paper, all companies, in more or less, reported on his work with social and environmental issues in their annual reports. In the survey, the variables size, return on equity, ownership structure and total disclosure were used. From the beginning, the idea was to also include the variable ownership identity, but when we had begun to explore corporate sustainability reports, we noticed that almost all the ones we had time to examine where privately owned and then realized that it had not produce any significant results and then we decided not to take the variable whatsoever.

In the beginning, there was also the variable industry in the investigation but it turned out to be too few observations in each industryc-category to produce any statistics.

The results that emerged from the study were that there is a correlation between a company's size and the mercy of voluntary sustainability reporting, thus giving support to the first hypothesis. However, the investigation revealed no support for other hypotheses, which argues that there is a positive relationship between profitability and disclosure of voluntary sustainability and between the company's ownership and its disclosure of voluntary sustainability reporting.