Sustainable development and precarious work in Natura’s integrated report: thinking of a counter-accounting

Abstract The concept of sustainability in business discourses has been characterized as an ideological movement aimed at legitimizing the power of large corporations. In 2010, the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) was launched with the aim of creating a globally accepted framework for accounting for sustainability. As legitimacy theories point that communication plays a central role in legitimation processes, in this article we compare the representation of the workforce of cosmetics sellers in 2015 corporate reports from Natura Cosméticos S/A, one of the Brazilian corporations most engaged in IIRC’s initiatives, to the results of independent academic studies. With this, we propose a counter-accounting, i.e. a discourse about organizational performance produced by actors who are independent from the organization’s management. Corroborating the understanding of the IIRC as an inter-organizational enterprise to legitimize a business-friendly definition of sustainability, we argue that in its integrated report Natura celebrates the exploitation of precarious work as a contribution to sustainable development.