This paper explores the ways in which sustainability reports reflect the structural causes
that shape shipping companies’ response to sustainability concerns, their actions taken
in this direction and their organizational experiences along this way. The methodology of
the paper is content analysis, and the analyzed content consists of the sustainability
reports of listed shipping companies in the European Union. The framework within which
the analysis takes place is the ontology of critical realism and its tripartite reality: real
(structures), actual (actions) and empirical (experience). The Risk-Return-Impact (RRI)
model that is employed in this paper reflects the interplay between financial and
sustainability considerations in the shipping industry and equips the navigation across
the tripartite critical-realist reality: structures (real), action (actual) and experiences
(empirical). Our findings shed light on the ways in which shipping companies act out of
the intention to reproduce or transform the structures that span the sustainability
discourse in the shipping industry.