Network and Financial Reporting

This chapter is in the vein of the network evaluation perspective, believing that it is important for entities belonging to a collaborative aggregation, whatever form they take, to be evaluated as a whole and their performance measured, or at least an attempt is made, because the choice whether to collaborate rests on the need to understand and to take informed decisions (Seiler et al., 2020). In particular, the investigation concentrates on business networks and proposes to consider performance measurement and communication through the fnancial reporting system by adopting the perspective of external stakeholders. In this regard, the problems noted in the literature on network evaluation are taken into consideration and analysed from an accounting perspective and following two different and complementary approaches of analysis, the prescriptive and the descriptive ones (Deegan, 2014; Godfrey et al., 2010). The final aim is to propose an alternative and possibly complementing point of view in network evaluation. The topic of performance evaluation of networks has been addressed by many contributions in the literature over the past years. Among the main issues related to network evaluation, and interconnected between them, are the evaluation criteria and the level of analysis (Sydow & Milward, 2003; Turrini et al., 2010). These two issues raised in the network evaluation literature reflect corresponding aspects of accounting studies that should be conveniently related to each other.