Isomorphism, Isopraxism and Isonymism in Integrated Reporting Diffusion

The idea of “integrated reporting” has been in the mind of business organizations, the accounting profession, and academics for 40 years now, with the first reports being published in the early 2000s. “For many years, integrated reporting has been something of a holy grail for advocates of accountability, something that has not been achieved through most efforts at triple bottom line reporting” (Todd, 2005, p. 3). However today, “[…] we are perhaps witnessing the early stages of widespread promulgation of a different way of thinking about corporate success and reporting” (Adams, 2015, p. 23). Using the theorical framework issued from the Scandinavian School in institutional theory, we posit that integrated reporting has diffused in complementary processes including isomorphisms, isopraxism and isonymism. Using a self-built database of integrated reportings from 2016, we built clusters of reports to explain how a global idea “integrated reporting” has travelled differently across countries, industries and type of companies. Our findings demonstrate that an idea diffuses widely and quickly if it allows for complementary diffusion processes to emerge