Chapter 5: Waiting for Materiality in the Context of Integrated Reporting: Theoretical Challenges and Preliminary Empirical Findings

The concept of materiality lies at the very heart of reporting environmental, social, and governance performance, as it has generally been acknowledged also in the financial accounting field, from both the practitioners and the academia.

Its supremacy and pivotal role is strictly related, in that sense, to the metaphorical discourses materiality is embedded into (Edgley, 2013).

In effect, with limited resources, managers have to choose a small set of material performance indicators and, hence, they face a strategic dilemma (especially when looking from a non-financial perspective), if to try to satisfy every one of the company’s stakeholders or to cope with the most strategic amongst them (Deloitte, 2012).