Integrated Reporting and Integrating Thinking: Practical Challenges

Integrated reporting () is currently a hot topic for academic research because of the practical challenges businesses encounter when implementing it. Motivated by the results from the IIRC’s call for feedback on the International Framework () implementation, this chapter focuses on the challenges of integrated thinking and examines the extant academic literature to offer contributions for future research based on practice. We find that integrated thinking suffers from significant conceptual, theoretical and practical challenges, which obstruct the claimed benefits deriving from the adoption of . Therefore, this chapter contributes to rethinking the paradigm of integrated thinking as an internal managerial practice, and calls for pragmatic research investigating internal practices and integrated thinking. Within third-stage research, that provides a critical and performative assessment of in action, we advocate that researchers need to shift the focus from reporting to internal practices. Accordingly, we claim that managers need to abandon the compliance-driven logic underpinning external reporting to foster integrated thinking and unlock its potential in practice.