Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/313796 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Citation: 
[Journal:] Business Strategy and the Environment [ISSN:] 1099-0836 [Volume:] 34 [Issue:] 1 [Publisher:] Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [Place:] Hoboken, NJ [Year:] 2024 [Pages:] 1097-1112
Publisher: 
Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
Abstract: 
Despite the prevalence of photographs in corporate sustainability reporting, their use is not yet sufficiently understood. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first large‐scale study in the field. Introducing a novel machine‐supported approach, we assess environmental photograph utilization based on a sample of 45,228 photographs contained in 1,463 separately disclosed sustainability reports from European firms between 2011 and 2020. We find that against the overall trend of decreasing photograph utilization, the share of environmentally themed photographs has markedly increased. Furthermore, operating in an environmentally sensitive industry is strongly associated with a substantially larger share of photographs depicting environmental subject matter. Lastly, we observe that companies signal their superior environmental performance through greater utilization of environmental photographs. By introducing a novel machine‐supported approach to analyzing photographs, this study makes a methodological contribution to the field of sustainability reporting. Our results also have important practical implications.
Subjects: 
corporate sustainability reporting
environmental
photograph use
photograph use
computer vision
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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