Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the reporting system of nonprofit organizations. A collaborative literature review on Scopus and WoS

This paper investigates the state of the art in the literature on the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as reported by nonprofit organizations in their reporting systems. Several research studies analyze DEI issues in business companies as part of their non-financial reporting information, but few studies are focused on the same issues related to nonprofit organizations. Therefore, we aim to fill this gap starting from debates already developed in the literature, especially in management and accounting. We investigate the prevalence of the intersection of DEI and nonprofit accounting/reporting in the literature, and the principal authors, countries, journals, and keywords in the combined field of research. In our study, we used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). Papers were selected from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) database. To focus our analysis, we considered only articles, book chapters, reviews, and conference papers published in English in business, accounting, management, and social science. Most of the selected documents are published in high-ranked journals by authors mainly from English-speaking and European countries. We find that DEI in nonprofit reporting is linked to research topics like governance (i.e. board composition and CEO characteristics), accountability, impact assessment, performance measurement, and funder requirements. This preliminary analysis could help researchers interested in these topics to focus on the principal research gaps identified in the literature.