In recent years, a newly-created corporate communication and value representation tool has emerged, capturing the attention of companies, standard setters, and academic literature. This tool, called Integrated Reporting (IR), has been developed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and aims to provide a holistic overview of business management by including financial and non-financial information in a single report. This work discusses the rise of IR and examines the academic literature in detail to identify, firstly, the different aspects scholars have investigated on and, secondly, the different theoretical perspectives that have been used to frame the IR phenomenon. This work also analyses the role of corporate governance mechanisms in correctly representing integrated information. Results show a focus by researchers on numerous areas of interest related to IR and the use of different theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, they demonstrate a clear influence of some corporate governance mechanisms such as the board of directors, audit committee and corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee on IR policies.

Nicola Raimo is a Research Fellow in Business Administration at the Department of Management, Finance and Technology of the LUM University, Casamassima (BA), Italy. He is also Professor of Managerial Accounting at the same university. He obtained his PhD from LUM University in 2021. In 2019 he was Visiting Scholar at the University of Salamanca in Spain. He is the Scientific Coordinator of the First Level one-year Master in 'Investor Relation & Financial Communication' of the LUM School of Management. His main research interests are: corporate social responsibility, integrated reporting, non-financial disclosure, intellectual capital, and digitalisation. He is the author of several published articles, serves as reviewer and is member of the editorial board of numerous international journals. He is also a member of Italian Society of Accounting and Business Administrations Scholars (SIDREA).