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Introduction
As Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) nears the end of its first decade, we believe it is a good time to reflect on what the journal has added to the general body of knowledge relative to one specific aspect of the sustainability arena – the disclosure of sustainability information[1]. To that end, we provide an overview of the sustainability disclosure articles published to date in this, the newest major outlet for research in the sustainability accounting domain, and then, importantly, we assess what we see as the strengths and weaknesses of the body of that work. However, similar to the prior reviews of contributions to specific journals (Gray, 2002; Owen, 2008; O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2016; Deegan, 2017), as well as summaries of social and environmental accounting across broader spectrums (Mathews, 1997; Alewine, 2010), we also are interested in identifying how the sustainability disclosure research published in SAMPJ to date informs our understanding of the phenomenon.
It is important to occasionally step back and reflect on where a field of study stands, and our review of the SAMPJ sustainability disclosure studies helps to accomplish such a goal. Reviews, as noted by Palmetier et al. (2018, p. 2), can “provide an integrated, synthesized overview of the current state of knowledge,” and we believe our assessment helps to do that. However, Palmetier et al. also point out the importance for reviews to identify existing gaps and offer suggestions for future research directions, and as such, in addition to summarizing the research to date, we also identify areas potentially open for expanding the contributions those publishing in the journal can make to the broad stream of sustainability disclosure research.
Method
We start our assessment with a very general review of what has been published in SAMPJ up through the end of 2017 (through Volume 8). As would be expected, given the scope of the journal and Editor Adams’ desire for the journal to be expansive (Adams, 2010), the topics cover a broad set of sustainability-related issues. We are interested in identifying the contributions to the sustainability disclosure domain, and as such, we limited our analysis to articles that bring new evidence to bear on the practice, regardless of the underlying methods used. Owen (2008) notes...