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The most successful companies want to remain successful and are continuously trying to improve their manufacturing operations. How and why these changes are decided, upon and driven through to implementation is of interest to all companies in any particular manufacturing sector. The research described in this paper looks at the drivers of change in UK clothing manufacturing companies. Clothing manufacturers face competitive pressures just as in other industries, but the sector has sonic particular characteristics. In the UK clothing industry, retailers rather than manufacturers dominate the list of key players. This concentration of retail buying power is coupled with intense competition in the home market from overseas and a highly negative balance of trade. The factors investigated as potential drivers of change included:

Materiality, as a content-selection principle, is an emerging trend in sustainability reporting for making sustainability reports (SRs) more relevant for stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether materiality matters in the reporting practice of universities which have adopted the Global Reporting Initiative G4 Guidelines.

Strategic stakeholder theory and sociological institutionalism serve for deriving conflicting expectations about the compliance of universities with the materiality principle. In the empirical section of this paper, content analyses are conducted on the documented material aspects, followed by a correlation analysis for examining to which extent the identified material aspects are reported in the SRs.

Although universities document G4-19 stakeholder-material aspects according to different relevance levels and for internal and external stakeholder groups, the identified material aspects are not appropriately reported in the SRs. The adoption of the materiality principle is a superficial one and therefore more in line with the expectations of sociological institutionalism.

The main limitation for this study is the small number of university SRs available. The chance to make SRs more relevant by focusing on stakeholder-material aspects is not used.

This paper reports the first study looking at the compliance between the documented material aspects and the content of SRs in a particular challenging organisational field, the university sector. This paper also adds to the emerging theoretical discussion about the extent universities implement materiality in SRs.