6. DEĞERLEME ÇALIŞMASI
6.3 Emsal Araştırması
6.3.1 Çevrede Konut Emsal Araştırması
There are several limitations to our study, which needs to be discussed. The first limitation relates to the availability of SRs and CSR-reports. Due to variable availability of these reports, we had to use a combination of SRs, CSR-reports and ARs. To be able to reduce variability of the findings on transparency in
Norwegian organisations’ reporting on environmental aspects, it would have been advantageous to analyse the same type of report across the time period
2010-2020. Similarly, it would have been beneficial if all the organisations in our sample had published reports from 2010-2020. However, a few organisations in the sample lack a 2010 or a 2020 report. Despite this, trends were easy to identify.
The next limitation relates to the choice of organisation in the sample. Due to limited availability of publicly published reports, we could not assess whichever organisation we wanted. This also affected the number of organisations within an industry. Another limitation of our study were time constraints. Collecting and analysing reports were quite time consuming, and the time allotted did not allow us to include more organisations in the sample. Lastly, it is necessary to
emphasize that our findings have limited generalisability beyond the context of the study, due to the methodology of choice.
In terms of future research, we believe that it might be beneficial to further investigate how organisations use impression management strategies to write about the effect of Covid-19 on emissions, efforts and initiatives in their 2020 reports and how this affects the transparency of that report. Building on our identified limitations, it would be worthwhile to conduct this study with a more extensive sample, with organisations that have all the reports in the same time span available. Lastly, it would be interesting to explore whether the level of neutrality, as conceptualised in this study, is applicable to all the top 100 organisations in Norway, or even in a Scandinavian or European context.
7.0 Conclusion
The aim of this thesis was to investigate the effect of impression management strategies on the transparency in SRs and ARs, on environmental matters, in a Norwegian context, across 10 years. We have examined and discussed the
development of transparency through the level of neutrality measure, both within and across organisations and industries. Despite the limitations of the study, our findings contribute to the existing literature in several ways. Firstly, our findings increase the understanding of transparency, and greenwashing, in Norwegian organisations’ SRs and ARs from a longitudinal perspective. The results indicate that there is significant variation within and across organisations and industries between 2010-2020, but that the level of neutrality generally increases and becomes more centralised between the 50%-87.5% interval. Despite the general increase, there are few organisations that score above the threshold in 2020.
Hence, suggesting the prevalence of impression management strategies and lack of transparency in the reporting of environmental matters, in Norwegian
organisations’ SRs and ARs. The findings substantiate previous research on transparency, greenwashing and impression management. Secondly, by
conceptualising the OSMM and analysing the maturity scores against the level of neutrality, our thesis showed that comprehensiveness of reporting is not
necessarily connected to transparency. As such, despite the development within the CSR- and Sustainability Reporting fields, Norwegian organisations still show greenwashing tendencies in their reporting practices of environmental matters.
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