Bridging the Gap Between Legitimacy and Neutralisation Strategies in Sustainability Reporting

Abstract

Amid global sustainability challenges, such as climate change, companies operating in different industries face increasing demands for accountability and transparency. To meet these demands, sustainability reporting (SR) has become a mainstream business practice in communicating companies’ positive and negative sustainability impacts. This short paper aims to increase our understanding of how companies may release negative information while seeking to maintain their legitimacy. For this purpose, the paper bridges the gap between legitimacy strategies, impression management and neutralisation techniques by reviewing their associated literature. The nature of neutralisation techniques and how organisations use them in the SR context is underexplored by scholars. Finally, the paper presents prospective discussions of an ongoing study that examines negative sustainability disclosure in the tourism transportation context, namely the airlines.