Finance Research Seminar by Prof. Christoph Pelger

The distinguished speaker is Prof. Christoph Pelger who is a Professor of Accounting and Auditing at the University of Passau in Germany.

His research interests are mainly in the area of financial reporting, in particular related to the adoption, development, application and enforcement of IFRS. His research has been published in several top journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Contemporary Accounting Research, and European Accounting Review.

Prof. Pelger is on the editorial board for several journals such as Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Accounting Business Research, and Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation.

For this seminar, Prof. Pelger will present a paper titled: "Constructing users of sustainability reporting– The case of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards".

Abstract:

In line with the IASB’s conceptual framework for financial reporting, the ISSB identifies decision usefulness as the sole objective of IFRS sustainability reporting with users being defined as investors, lenders and other creditors. While in financial reporting the limitation of users to capital market participants and their conceptualisation as rational economic decision makers has hardly been questioned, sustainability reporting has traditionally considered a broader range of users. This paper analyses how users were constructed by the ISSB and its constituents. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s Sociology of Worth, the paper uses a qualitative interpretative research approach to gain in-depth insights into the construction of users based on documents published by the IFRS Foundation/ISSB, ISSB board meetings, and constituents’ comment letters. Despite constituents’ support for the standard setter’s investor focus, the analysis reveals a notable discrepancy: While the ISSB adheres to the ideal of a homo oeconomicus when discussing users, constituents, and especially actual users, challenge this notion and emphasise the heterogeneity of investors as users. They construct complex and nuanced notions of users and also emphasise investors’ evolving environmental preferences and their social responsibilities. This finding points to limitations of the IFRS Foundation’s attempt to fully transfer its conceptual mindset from financial reporting to sustainability reporting. However, rather than revealing a radically new understanding of green values and reporting objectives, our empirical findings suggest that constituents’ principles and valuations still occur within established categories.