Connectivity: A New “Portemanteau” Concept in Corporate Reporting? A Preliminary Literature Review on Linkages Between Financial and Sustainability Information

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of “connectivity” between financial and sustainability reporting has emerged as a central construct in both regulatory frameworks and academic discourse, being recognised as a qualifying attribute of high quality corporate reporting by major standard setters, including the IIRC, the EFRAG and the IFRS/ISSB. Despite its growing normative prominence, the concept remains theoretically fragmented, empirically underexplored and methodologically contested—with interpretations varying significantly across regulatory frameworks, theoretical traditions and empirical research designs. A preliminary critical narrative review was conducted, combining structured searches of major academic databases (WOS, Scopus, Google Scholar)—which identified a total corpus of 115 publications—with a purposive examination of key regulatory documents produced by the IIRC, the EFRAG and the IFRS/ISSB. This review was structured around three research questions addressing, respectively, the conceptualisation of connectivity across theoretical and regulatory frameworks, its principal typologies and theoretical foundations, and the approaches developed for its empirical measurement. The analysis reveals that connectivity is an intrinsically multidimensional concept—aptly described as a “portemanteau” term—whose meanings, typologies and measurement approaches remain fragmented and only partially convergent. Five families of typologies are identified (direct/indirect; specific/general; technical–accounting/informational–managerial; investor-focused/stakeholder-oriented; textual/intertextual/relational), operating at different analytical levels and not mutually exclusive. Regulatory frameworks conceptualise connectivity as an attribute of holistic, coherent corporate reporting but diverge significantly in their underlying conception of materiality—single financial materiality in the IFRS/ISSB framework versus double materiality in the ESRS—with direct implications for the scope and direction of connectivity. Empirical measurement remains a genuine “work in progress”: disclosure indices, textual measures and hybrid indicators each capture different facets of the construct and do not yet converge towards a shared and widely validated framework. The available evidence—while broadly consistent in reporting low to medium-low levels of connectivity, with qualitative linkages predominating over quantitative ones—should be interpreted as associative rather than causal, given unresolved endogeneity concerns. This paper provides the first structured critical mapping of all principal dimensions of connectivity in corporate reporting, at a stage when the literature is still in formation. It identifies the distinction between formal and substantive connectivity as a central open question and outlines a specific future research agenda addressing construct validity, causal identification, longitudinal analysis and the role of assurance.