Banca de DEFESA: Isabelle Caroline Bevilaqua

THE DISCOURSE OF THE INTEGRATED REPORT FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF DIALOGIC ACCOUNTING

Integrated Report. Dialogic Accounting. Public sector. Accountability. Accountability.

The proposal to adopt Integrated Reporting is the search for improving the quality of information disclosed by organizations, based on a long-term vision and which considers the integration of financial and non-financial information. Integrated Reporting from the perspective of dialogical accounting can include a diversity of points of view and encompassing the discourses of society and minority groups in its content and, from the opportunity to involve its stakeholders, there is an improvement in accountability and accountability. In the Brazilian public sector, the Integrated Report was adopted as a model for preparing the Management Report of the Accounting Units controlled by the Federal Audit Court, obligatorily since 2020. This fact, converted to the general objective of the thesis, which consists of analyzing how the Dialogic accounting operates in the analysis of the discursive construction on the adoption of Integrated Reporting in the international context and as a tool for Accountability and Accountability in the Brazilian Public Sector. To meet the purpose of this thesis, Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory was applied, and a qualitative and documentary approach was applied. 18 documents were analyzed that comprise the development of the report in the international context published between the years 2011 and 2021 and 5 documents related to the adoption of the report in the Brazilian public sector covering the period from 2018 to 2022. For analysis of the documents used the Logic of Critical Explanation created by Glynos and Howarth (2007, 2008) as a methodology for identifying discourses. Additionally, the Management Reports of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change for the years 2020 to 2023 were analyzed based on an accountability assessment model that considers the principles of Integrated Reporting in conjunction with the principles of dialogical accounting, whose data processing was carried out using the IRaMuTeQ® software. The results show that the International Integrated Reporting Council opens the dialogue with details, supporting a scenario for the development of democracy, in line with the assumptions of dialogical accounting. However, its discourse is hegemonic and focuses on information directed to the provider of financial capital and with a framework focused on the capitalist scenario and the business case, that is, aligned with monological accounting. It was identified that the discourse of the Federal Audit Court is antagonistic to the international discourse of integrated reporting, as it expands the IR audience to society. From the application of social, political and fantastic logics, it is possible to infer that the search for integration, business communication and involvement with stakeholders explain the identified discourse. Furthermore, the adoption of IR in the public sector is motivated by improving transparency, the entity's accountability and accountability. The results of the empirical analysis allow us to conclude that the ministry's Management Report has dialogical accounting skills when considering the existence of multiple ideological orientations in the dissemination of information in the report, as well as allowing access to non-specialists. However, there are dialogical accounting principles that are not met in the publication of the report. Therefore, this thesis contributes to the understanding of the dominant discursive forms and the underlying political interests in making the Integrated Report model mandatory for the delimited sample. Even so, the advancement of research that links Dialogic Accounting proposals in the area can facilitate a critical and differentiated discussion of the value of Integrated Reporting as an initiative for change to promote democratic and transparent reporting