Managerial Risk Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: Evidence from the Forestry Sector in China

Feifei Lu,Zuomin Wen,Anne Toppinen,Dalia D’Amato,Zhaohua Wang

doi:10.3390/su13126811

Abstract

Understanding how managers perceive risks in the decision-making process of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure is vital, especially in sectors with high social and environmental demands on sustainability. The main aim of this study was to explore the impact of managerial risk perceptions and influencing factors on CSR disclosure in the forestry sector of China and to improve the sustainable development of forestry. Utilizing survey data of 214 managers from Chinese forestry enterprises, we analyzed how manager backgrounds, including six variables (gender, age, education level, degree major, number of years working as a manager, and work experience) related to the managers’ risk perceptions of CSR disclosure via a two-stage model. The analyses of the two-stage model revealed that the influence factors differ in the two stages of risk perception. According to our results, influencing factors were not the same at various stages of the CSR reporting process. This requires decision makers to take practical driving factors into account and select managers with different characteristics to carry out the CSR disclosure of forestry enterprises.

Highlights

To ensure the sustainable development of society, the economy, and the environment [1,2,3,4], enterprises in all sectors must fulfill their social responsibilities [5]
According to analyses of the extent of administrator risk recognition, most hold that releasing forestry enterprise corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports poses an average or low supervision risk to various stakeholders, an average percentage believe the supervision risk to be very low or relatively high, and nearly no administrators think the supervision risk is very high
These findings are interesting in comparison to Wang and Juslin [25], who found that various stakeholders perceive CSR according to their own preferences and emphasize issues related to their interests and benefits, such as those analyzed in the perception of various stakeholders in our study

Summary

Introduction

To ensure the sustainable development of society, the economy, and the environment [1,2,3,4], enterprises in all sectors must fulfill their social responsibilities [5]. Forestry enterprises with land-use level impacts are no exception [6]. As their activities are closely related to forests and surrounding ecosystems [7,8], such enterprises are expected to account for the needs of all other stakeholders while pursuing maximum economic gains for shareholders [9,10,11,12,13]. To engage with sustainability issues [14], they adopt a range of measures, such as adhering to business practices that comply with ethical standards, rationally utilizing forest resources, conserving energy and reducing emissions, improving technology, strengthening management, fulfilling their social responsibilities, and disclosing evaluations of their sustainability performance [6,15,16].

Objectives

Results

Conclusion