Making different sense of corporate sustainability reporting directive: emotion, identity and divergent professional pathways

This study aims to investigate how sustainability professionals make sense of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), a major institutional change in the European regulatory landscape. It aims to understand how professional role, prior reporting exposure and emotional framing shape the way this new mandate is interpreted and internalized. The findings reveal four divergent sensemaking pathways shaped by role-specific experiences and reporting histories. Consultants interpret the CSRD as a business opportunity; managers in Non-Financial Reporting Directive–subject firms view it as continuity and recognition; those with voluntary reporting experience frame it as validation; while professionals with fragmented or no experience perceive it as a technical-organizational shock. Each pathway is associated with specific emotional responses – from enthusiasm to anxiety – showing how institutional change activates identity work and emotional meaning-making. This research contributes to sensemaking and institutional theory by revealing how a single regulatory event can produce multiple, emotionally charged interpretations. It extends emotion-based and identity-centered perspectives in the study of institutional change, offering a novel framework for understanding regulatory multiplicity and the lived experience of sustainability professionals in transition.