Translating sustainability reporting in a hybrid organisation: institutional logics as an “abstract actor”

The aim of the Essex Accounting Centre (EAC) research seminar series is to support our world-class research activities in six key areas: accounting and global development; business education; capital Markets, audit, regulation & reporting; publicness and resilience, precarity, exclusion & social justice; and environment, climate change & vulnerability. The seminar series is also expected to promote inter-disciplinary research that links the work of members of the centre with others both within the university and with external institutions.

The paper aims to contribute to the scholarly debate on accountability transitions within hybrid organisations. It investigates how sustainability reporting is implemented and negotiated within these organisations, focusing on the translation processes through which reporting is implemented, institutional tensions, and actor dynamics that configure new forms of accountability.

The study is guided by the central research question: How does sustainability reporting emerge through translation processes in hybrid organisations, considering the role of institutional logics within actor-networks?

The study is grounded in Actor-Network Theory, which provides the ontological framework to analyse sustainability reporting as an outcome of translation processes within heterogeneous actor-networks. Institutional logics are mobilised as an interpretive lens to examine how different rationalities emerge, become embedded, and are stabilised through accounting objects during these translation processes.

Empirically, the paper presents a longitudinal, qualitative case study of a municipally-owned enterprise (MOE) operating in the environmental sector. The research analyses the implementation of the company’s first and second GRI-based sustainability reports utilising data from semi-structured interviews, direct observation of internal meetings, and documentary analysis.

The findings reveal that during the initial year, the reporting process was predominantly driven by external consultants, characterised by limited leadership engagement, minimal training, and weak internal integration. In this phase, reporting functioned largely as a compliance exercise, reflecting unstable actor-networks and the dominance of state and professional logics. In the second year, nascent organisational learning processes began to emerge: managerial participation increased, training sessions were introduced, and internal communication improved, further reinforcing the professional logic, especially among the operational actors. Nevertheless, a strong dependence on consultants and the continued absence of strategic leadership impeded the full institutionalisation of reporting as a substantive governance tool.

This study offers a theoretical contribution by demonstrating that sustainability reporting is not a linear adoption of standards but rather a conflictual translation process, wherein institutional logics and socio-technical networks continuously reshape one another. The integration of Institutional Logics Theory and ANT enables the analysis to capture both macro-level institutional dynamics and the micro-level practices of negotiation, adaptation, and resistance through which accountability is ultimately enacted.