Popular, integrated and social reporting in the public sector: new glasses or empty bottles?

Public accountability and transparency represent a relevant topic debated both at the political, media and academic levels (Boyce, 2014). New public management reforms were also aimed at making public sector organisations more accountable to the stakeholders, and citizens first (Jacobs, 2016). The austerity policies are pushing public sector organisations to reinvent the mode of delivery with the increase use of hybrid forms, such as public-private-partnerships and co-production (Bracci, Fugini, & Sicilia, 2016). In such context, public accountability is becoming even more blurred and difficult to be brought to the users (Hyndman & Lapsley, 2016). Accrual accounting, performance measurement, financial reporting, non-financial reporting, all of these represent examples of changes also aimed at improving the accountability of public sector organisations, or more in general of public service organisations (Broadbent & Guthrie, 2008). Despite the innovation toward the harmonization and improvement of public sector accounting, traditional financial reporting is not considered to be capable of fulfilling the accountability obligations with regards to the wider non-expert citizenry. At the same time, public sector organizations are increasingly required to be more transparent, providing an increasing amount of data through their website. Although, transparency is an important value to increase the possibility for a social control by the citizens, and reducing the diffusion of frauds and corruption, it does not guarantee the fulfilment of the accountability obligations. Indeed, while transparency can be considered a pre-requisite of accountability, the latter requires the development of a set of action and the provision of specific accountability medium. To this respect, we observed, both in practice and into the academic debate an increasing discussion and presentation of alternative reporting tools. The latter intended to overcome the limits of the financial reporting. In particular, social reporting, popular reporting and integrated reporting are three of the most known, diffused and debated reporting medium. With some exceptions (Cohen & Karatzimas, 2015), the above reporting tools have been studied in isolation, focusing on their role, diffusions, implications and effects. In this paper, we aim to provide a comparative analysis of three public accountability tools, namely social reporting, popular financial reporting, and integrated reporting. After a separate analysis of the three reporting tools, the paper carries out an analysis of the similarities, differences among them and possible reflections on their development. In particular, we will speculate about the practical and research implications of the emergence of these forms of reporting practice in the public sector. We draw from the accountability literature and from the literature on management innovation diffusion (Abrahamson, 1991), in order to give some preliminary hints about the different level of development of the reporting tools. The rest of the paper is structured in the following fashion. Section 2 will provide an introductory analysis of the increasing call for transparency, accountability and additional forms of reporting with respect to the traditional financial one. Section 3 will briefly explain the methodology of analysis, while section 4 will present the analysis of the main characteristics of the social reporting, popular reporting and integrated reporting. Section 5 will develop the comparative analysis among the three reporting tools, before concluding with some preliminary closing comments.