Zooming Into Standard Implementation: Materiality and Institutional Work in Mandatory Charity Performance Reporting

Abstract

ABSTRACT Funders and regulators are challenging public benefit entities (PBEs), including charities, to improve their reporting about the difference they make for accountability and decision‐making purposes. Yet, PBEs contend that this non‐financial performance reporting is challenging to scope, measure, and report. Although mandating the reporting is seen as a solution, little is known about how such mandates are implemented in practice. We focus on the tangible elements, artifacts, and technologies (materiality) that standard‐setters and regulators use to shape the potential and effects of regulatory changes. Drawing on institutional work (IW) theory, this study examines how materiality shapes IW in the implementation of mandatory performance reporting by accounting standard‐setters and charity regulators in New Zealand, the only jurisdiction that introduced mandatory performance reporting. On the basis of extensive documentary analysis and in‐depth interviews, our findings reveal that implementation is achieved through situated, evolving material arrangements that make the regulatory changes both legitimate to and implementable for charities. Materiality, manifest through physical places and spaces as well as material artifacts, and later through digital platforms and technologies, plays a central role in shaping IW. These materials act both as scaffolds, providing situated support for standard‐setters and regulators to educate, engage, and sustain performance reporting practices, and as complicators, introducing challenges and constraints that reshape how such work unfolds over time.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Financial Accountability and Management, 2026 · DOI ↗