Abstract
With the dawn of a fourth industrial revolution, organisations across the globe are at an important strategic crossroad. With developments and challenges to the South African mining sector, the reputational risk to mining organisations is increased. These organisations are on trial in a court of public opinion. It is a time of reputational judgement when mining organisations are scrutinised on aspects that affect their reputations with stakeholders. To mitigate risk, mining organisations must know how to proactively manage their reputations and deliver on reputation promises and assurances. In order to create and manage corporate reputation, organisations need to develop clear corporate reputation reports that signal their organisational reputations to stakeholders. They need a social license through corporate reputation reporting, to operate.
Whilst integrated reporting has contributed towards good corporate governance both globally and in the South African mining sector, it does not offer a single solution to reporting. Reporting standards are criticised for not providing enough information to substantiate a reporting practice. Corporate reputation reporting is further described as a neglected field in corporate reputation literature. This observation is important when considering the key role of reputation as intangible asset that contributes to sustainability.
This study employed exploratory sequential mixed methods over two phases in order to identify and understand material stakeholders, and constructs and items for corporate reputation reporting in the South African mining sector. A multi-theoretical approach was adopted to analyse findings and results in light of the development of a proposed framework for corporate reputation reporting. The two phases yielded a corporate reputation reporting framework.
The proposed corporate reputation reporting framework for the South African mining sector offers a contextualised, multi-faceted, multi-dimensional tool for corporate reputation reporting. Importantly, this study highlights the need to report on corporate reputation as part of integrated reporting to obtain a social license to operate. The proposed framework translates research into practice for integrated reporting. It further sets the scene for the future development of contextualised corporate reputation reporting from a stakeholder theoretic perspective...