Mapping the Landscape of Integrated Reporting: Cross‐Industry Insights and Global Perspectives From a Topic Modeling Approach

This study investigates how companies across different industries emphasize themes within Integrated Reporting (IR), as promoted by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). As IR gains relevance for advancing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure, understanding sectoral reporting patterns becomes essential. Building on dialogic accounting, we frame IR as a continuum between monologic disclosure—where reporting remains finance‐led and stakeholder dialog is effectively “closed down”—and dialogic accountability, where multiple value dimensions are connected and trade‐offs are made visible. Using topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), multidimensional scaling, and ANOVA tests, the analysis examines 425 best‐practice integrated reports from Corporate Register and the Integrated Reporting Example Database of the IFRS Council. Results show substantial cross‐industry variations; however, the analysis also highlights three overarching patterns that are not implied by industry differences alone. First, finance‐centered discourse remains structurally dominant even within best‐practice IR. Second, sustainability‐related discourse appears comparatively bounded, suggesting compartmentalization rather than diffusion across reporting domains. Third, the “connectivity of information” central to the IR promise emerges as empirically weak, as indicated by the persistent distance between sustainability and financial‐performance topics. These findings challenge the implicit assumption that IR best practices naturally approximate integrated thinking and instead suggest a systematic tendency toward monologic reporting structures. The study contributes to CSR and environmental management literature by offering empirical, data‐driven insights into how industry context shapes reporting priorities and by providing a scalable text‐analytic protocol that can support regulators and practitioners in monitoring whether integration improves as CSRD‐ and ISSB‐related disclosure regimes diffuse.