Factors affecting the sustainability disclosures in Swedish State-Owned Enterprises as hybrid organizations

Abstract: The Swedish SOEs carry an important role in the society since they are suppliers of public services and this puts greater demands on the SOEs to act align with the society’s interest and expectations. The SOEs have non-profit and financial goals (i.e. conflicting objectives). These aspects in combination with an increasing demand for transparency makes it crucial to study how SOEs disclose sustainability information to demonstrate and serve the public good while operating in a multi-dimensional market. Hence, what sustainability information the SOEs disclose and what factors related to hybridity that affect the disclosures are important to study as well. The research purpose is to explore the content of the Swedish SOEs’ sustainability reports and how the SOEs disclose sustainability information (integrated or in separate reports) with a quantitative content analysis. Theories used are Institutional Theory, Legitimacy Theory and Stakeholder Theory. The findings of this research are that only state ownership and corporate size affect the SOEs’ sustainability disclosures significantly. Fully owned SOEs disclose less sustainability indicators compared to partially owned SOEs and big-sized SOEs disclose an increased amount of sustainability indicators compared to the small-sized SOEs. However, there were indicators that the factors activity and gender diversity affect the disclosures negatively. Continuously, there were some indicators in the statistical analyses that the factors state representatives on the Board of Directors and profitability affect the disclosures positively. Almost all SOEs that were included in this research apply Integrated Reporting, showing that there is a greater need of transparency and legitimacy. Accountability is therefore argued to have an increased importance in the SOEs as hybrid organizations, since their complex hybrid nature creates a lack of accountability.