Meanings of the term ‘sustainable development’ in Finnish corporate disclosures

There is an on-going discursive struggle over how the social and environmental problems related to modern societies should be understood and resolved. Sustainable development has become a pre-eminent concept in these discussions and businesses are increasingly employing the term in their communications. However, sustainable development means “different things to different people in different contexts” Bebbington, J. (2001). Sustainable development: A review of the international development, business and accounting literature. Accounting Forum, 25(2), 128–157; see p. 129. Thus, there have been recent calls in the literature to analyse what the companies are actually saying in their disclosures Thomson, I., Kolk, A. (1999). Evaluating corporate environmental reporting. Business Strategy and the Environment, 8, 225–237. Subscribing to the social construction of reality, this study critically assesses how the term ‘sustainable development’ is constructed in the disclosures of Finnish listed companies.