Is the Non-Financial Reporting able to be a steering and reporting tool at the same time?
Résumé
This ethnographical research questions the plasticity (Miroir et al, 2015) of the Non-Financial Reporting (NFR). We will articulate Peirce’s perspective on signs and the concept of “agencement organisationnel” (Girin, 2016/1995) to question the ability of the NFR to be simultaneously a tool for reporting and steering.
We show that the NFR is embedded in multiple mandates where agent and mandator have different purposes and perspective on the representation of the activity that are encapsulated in the non-financial indicator. As defined by Girin, the mandate relationship is characterized by a mandator who tell and an agent who do. We propose a focus on three mandates to show that position within the organization matters and affects goals of actors and the interpretant that they will mobilize to approach the indicator. We argue that this difference between mandator and agent comes with a gap in term of distance to experience which prevent the NFR to satisfy those two functions. Thanks to our internal perspective within the organization we show that the NFR constitutes a lever for action, used by actors to support their own strategy. Our results show that the practice of decoupling (where actors set a frontier between indicators for reporting and indicators for steering) is a result of an embeddedness of mandates which brings the NFR’s plasticity to its breaking point.