Quality Of Corporate Social Disclosure Research Articles

CSR reporting and the UK financial services sector

PurposeSector‐specific guidelines have often been suggested as the way to encourage corporate social disclosure. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent to which disclosure in published annual reports of organisations within the financial services sector complies with their sector guidelines.Design/methodology/approachThe financial services sector can be broadly defined as consisting of three sub‐sectors: Banks, Insurance Providers, and Building Societies, and the industry is dominated by a relatively small number of large mainstream providers. Here content analysis was used to investigate the disclosure of major banks, building societies and insurance providers, using their Annual Report and Accounts and, if published annually, their stand‐alone CSR reports for the same period.FindingsAlthough the “moral” and “business‐case” arguments should lead organisations to be accountable to their stakeholders in respect of their social and environmental impact, the level of disclosure is lamentably low across the financial services sector with an observable tendency for compliance to be related to size – the larger the organisation, the more likelihood of compliance, which might indicate a resource issue.Research limitations/implicationsThe nature of the enquiry did not permit an in‐depth analysis of the motivations for extensive reporting. However, it allows the identification of those organisations seeking to legitimate or mediate perceptions of their behaviour, whereby only good news is reported by selective inclusion or exclusion of disclosure categories and issues.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the debate on whether sector‐specific guidelines will increase the level and quality of corporate social disclosure.

Disclosure media for social and environmental matters within the Australian food and beverage industry

Historical studies that have examined the extent and quality of Corporate Social Disclosure (CSD) have limited their analysis to annual reports. However, there is growing evidence that companies use other media to communicate their corporate social and environmental performance (Frost et al., 2005; Unerman et al., 2007). This paper assesses the appropriateness of relying exclusively on analysis of CSD within annual reports in developing an understanding of CSD practices. This paper applies an industry‐specific CSD framework to the annual reports and websites of a sample of companies. The paper finds that the companies utilised corporate websites for their CSD. Annual reports and corporate websites were used for reporting different types of CSD information. This indicates the need for researchers to consider including multiple reporting media sources in their CSD analysis.

Exploring differences in social disclosures internationally: A stakeholder perspective

Country of origin is considered to be an important determinant of the level and type of corporate social disclosure. In this paper, we use stakeholder theory to explain differences in social disclosure among countries. We argue that the manner in which the role of a corporation and its stakeholders is defined in a society will affect the extent and quality of corporate social disclosure (CSD) in annual reports. Our findings based on a content analysis of 1998 and 1999 annual reports for 32 Norwegian/Danish companies and 26 US companies in the electric power generation industry, lend support to the stakeholder explanation for observed international differences in CSD.