Abstract
PurposeThis paper aims to examine the relationship between board demographic diversity and human rights reporting for a sample of large Western European companies.Design/methodology/approachGrounded on resource dependence theory, the authors hypothesize that greater gender, age and nationality diversities will translate into enhanced levels of human rights reporting. The authors use ordinal logistic regression analysis to analyze the association between these types of board diversity and such reporting.FindingsThe findings suggest that the companies in the sample attribute little importance to the reporting of information pertaining to the issue of human rights. They also suggest that only the diversity of nations represented in the board of directors is significant in explaining this type of reporting.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample includes only large companies from Western Europe and the analysis covers only one year.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first empirical analysis of factors influencing human rights reporting conducted on a multiple-country setting. It is also the first investigating the association between boards of directors’ demographic diversity and such reporting.
Highlights
The human rights (HR) issue is one of the well-established issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the study of HR reporting is a relatively new trend in academic literature
Given that we already have the evidence for the case of the USA, we focus on Western European countries with the aim at extending the insights offered by Kaspereit et al.’s study to the case of these countries, while focusing on HR reporting and examining the associations concerning other diversity-related variables
We extend the findings of Kaspereit et al (2016) by providing evidence of a statistically non-significant association between gender diversity and the HR CSR dimension in the case of large Western European companies
Summary
The human rights (HR) issue is one of the well-established issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the study of HR reporting is a relatively new trend in academic literature. Numerous articles on the HR issue have already been published in international journals (Buhmann et al, 2019; Wettstein, 2012; Ramasastry, 2015). The same cannot be said regarding the HR reporting literature. Regarding the studies on HR reporting, they are relatively recent and have been conducted. The full terms of this licence maybe seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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