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  1. Determinants of Social Disclosure Quality in Taiwan: An Application of Stakeholder Theory.Yi-Hsin Wang & Tzu-Kuan Chiu - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 129 (2):379-398.
    This study adopts a stakeholder theory framework to examine determinants of social reporting quality and empirically test the ability of the theory to explain disclosure quality in an emerging economy. Using a sample of 246 listed companies and a hand-collected dataset that included 2 years of data based on survey questions reflecting international disclosure trends, we apply an aggregate measure of quality with five facets to a variety of corporate social responsibility areas. The results support the application and demonstrate that (...)
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  • Retail Chains’ Corporate Social Responsibility Communication.Jakob Utgård - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 147 (2):385-400.
    This study examines determinants of retail chains’ corporate social responsibility communication on their web pages. The theoretical foundation for the study is signaling theory, which suggests that firms will communicate about their CSR efforts when this is profitable for them and when such communication makes it possible for outsiders to distinguish good from bad performers. Based on this theory, I develop hypotheses about retail chains’ CSR signaling. The hypotheses are tested in a sample of 208 retail chains in the Norwegian (...)
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  • Does context matter for sustainability disclosure? Institutional factors in Southeast Asia.Mi Tran & Eshani Beddewela - 2020 - Business Ethics: A European Review 29 (2):282-302.
    Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.
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  • An Evaluation of the Quality of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports by Some of the World’s Largest Financial Institutions.S. Prakash Sethi, Terrence F. Martell & Mert Demir - 2017 - Journal of Business Ethics 140 (4):787-805.
    This study investigates the variations in the quality and comprehensiveness of 104 corporate social responsibility reports published by the world’s largest financial institutions in 2012. Using a novel measure of CSR report quality, we examine the impact of certain national, legal, and firm-level factors that might explain differences in the overall quality and extent of coverage of various issues in these reports. Our findings show that legal factors and CSR environment in a firm’s country of headquarters play an important role (...)
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  • CSR Rating Agencies: What is Their Global Impact?Steven Scalet & Thomas F. Kelly - 2010 - Journal of Business Ethics 94 (1):69-88.
    In the last two decades, there has been a pronounced growth of CSR rating agencies that assess corporations based on their social and environmental performance. This article investigates the impact of CSR ratings on the behavior of individual corporations. To what extent do corporations adjust their behavior based on how they rank? Our primary finding is that being dropped from a CSR ranking appears to do little to encourage firms to acknowledge and address problems related to their social and environmental (...)
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  • Board Gender Diversity and Corporate Response to Cyber Risk: Evidence from Cybersecurity Related Disclosure.Camélia Radu & Nadia Smaili - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 177 (2):351-374.
    Cyber risk has become one of the greatest threats to firms in recent years. Accordingly, boards of directors must be continually vigilant about this danger. They have a duty to ensure that the companies adopt appropriate cybersecurity measures to manage the risk of cyber fraud. Boards should also ensure that the firm disclose material cyber risk and breaches. We examine how the board’s gender composition can influence the extent of such disclosure, based on a sample of the companies listed on (...)
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  • Does the Voluntary Adoption of Corporate Governance Mechanisms Improve Environmental Risk Disclosures? Evidence from Greenhouse Gas Emission Accounting.Gary F. Peters & Andrea M. Romi - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 125 (4):1-30.
    Prior research suggests that voluntary environmental governance mechanisms operate to enhance a firm’s environmental legitimacy as opposed to being a driver of proactive environmental performance activities. To understand how these mechanisms contribute to the firm’s environmental legitimacy, we investigate whether environmental corporate governance characteristics are associated with voluntary environmental disclosure. We examine an increasingly important attribute of a firm’s disclosure setting, namely the disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) information. GHG information represents proprietary non-financial information about the firm’s exposure to environmental (...)
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  • Black Economic Empowerment Disclosures by South African Listed Corporations: The Influence of Ownership and Board Characteristics. [REVIEW]Collins G. Ntim & Teerooven Soobaroyen - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 116 (1):121-138.
    This study investigates the extent to which South African listed corporations voluntarily disclose information on black economic empowerment (BEE) in their annual and sustainability reports using a sample of 75 listed corporations from 2003 to 2009. BEE is a form of socio-economic affirmative action championed by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government to address historical imbalances in business participation and ownership in South Africa. We find that block ownership and institutional ownership are negatively associated with the extent of BEE disclosures, (...)
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  • Online sustainable development goals disclosure: A comparative study in Italian and Spanish local governments.Giuseppe Nicolò, Francisco Javier Andrades-Peña, Diana Ferullo & Domingo Martinez-Martinez - 2023 - Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility 32 (4):1490-1505.
    In this study, we performed a comparative analysis to examine the extent to which local governments (LGs) in two Mediterranean countries – Spain and Italy – use their websites to disclose information related to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in response to the launch of the United Nations' (UN) 2030 Agenda. We performed a manual content analysis of the official websites of all Italian and Spanish LGs with more than 100,000 inhabitants, constructing different disclosure indexes. We then used a non-parametric statistical (...)
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  • Whether Top Executives' Turnover Influences Environmental Responsibility: From the Perspective of Environmental Information Disclosure. [REVIEW]X. H. Meng, S. X. Zeng, C. M. Tam & X. D. Xu - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 114 (2):341-353.
    We have empirically examined the relationship between top executives’ turnover and the corporate environmental responsibility by identifying the influence of ten specific turnover reasons resulting in the chairman’s departure and two important types of chairman’s succession. Using a sample of 782 manufacturing listed companies across 3 years in China, we find that the corporate environmental responsibility is negatively associated with the involuntary and negative turnover (i.e., dismissal, health and death, and forced resignation) and positively associated with improving corporate governance, and (...)
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  • From Voluntarism to Regulation: A Study on Ownership, Economic Performance and Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure in China. [REVIEW]X. H. Meng, S. X. Zeng & C. M. Tam - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 116 (1):217-232.
    This article examines whether economic performance could affect EID and how the relationship is determined by the form of ownership from voluntarism to regulation under the current Chinese context. In this study, our empirical results show that the relationship between firms’ performance and EID is complex and the interactive impact of ownership and economic performance on EID significantly varies from voluntary disclosure to mandatory disclosure. This study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the motivations in corporate EID. The performance–impression theory (...)
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  • A Longitudinal Study of Corporate Social Disclosures in a Developing Economy.J. D. Mahadeo, V. Oogarah-Hanuman & T. Soobaroyen - 2011 - Journal of Business Ethics 104 (4):545-558.
    This article examines corporate social disclosures (CSD) in an African developing economy (Mauritius) as provided in the annual reports of listed companies from 2004 to 2007. Informed by the country’s social, political and economic context and legitimacy theory, we hypothesise that the extent and variety of CSD themes (social, ethics, environment and health and safety) will be enhanced post-2004 and will be influenced by profitability, size, leverage and industry affiliation. We find a significant increase in the volume and variety of (...)
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  • Firm performance, corporate ownership, and corporate social responsibility disclosure in China.Qi Li, Wei Luo, Yaping Wang & Liansheng Wu - 2013 - Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility 22 (1):159-173.
    The existing literature provides conflicting results on the association between firm performance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. This paper empirically examines the effect of firm performance on CSR disclosure in terms of disclosure frequency and quality among Chinese listed firms and the possible mediating effect of corporate ownership on the relationship between firm performance and CSR disclosure. Our findings show that better-performing firms are more likely than worse-performing ones to disclose CSR information and to produce higher quality CSR reports. (...)
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  • Firm performance, corporate ownership, and corporate social responsibility disclosure in China.Qi Li, Wei Luo, Yaping Wang & Liansheng Wu - 2013 - Business Ethics: A European Review 22 (2):159-173.
    The existing literature provides conflicting results on the association between firm performance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. This paper empirically examines the effect of firm performance on CSR disclosure in terms of disclosure frequency and quality among Chinese listed firms and the possible mediating effect of corporate ownership on the relationship between firm performance and CSR disclosure. Our findings show that better‐performing firms are more likely than worse‐performing ones to disclose CSR information and to produce higher quality CSR reports. (...)
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  • An Integrational Framework of Organizational Moral Development, Legitimacy, and Corporate Responsibility: A Longitudinal, Intersectoral Analysis of Citizenship Reports.Gabriella Lewis, Sergio Palacios & Marcus A. Valenzuela - 2016 - Business and Society Review 121 (4):593-623.
    In this article, we outline a unique conceptual framework connecting legitimacy types (Suchman, 1995), theories of corporate responsibility (Brummer, 1991), and levels of organizational moral development based on Kohlberg's (1971) moral development stages. In addition, based on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) categories, we found empirical support for our framework, by content analyzing Fortune 500 corporate citizenship reports from four different industries (i.e., chemicals, motor vehicle/auto parts, pharmaceutical, and utilities), at three data points (i.e., 2002, 2007, and 2012). Our analysis indicates (...)
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  • Contents and Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility Website Reporting in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Seven-Country Study.Matthias S. Fifka, Markus Stiglbauer & Anna-Lena Kühn - 2018 - Business and Society 57 (3):437-480.
    Corporate social responsibility in developing countries has recently received increasing attention, and scholars have pointed to the strong contextuality of CSR in the respective regions. Regarding the latter, however, sub-Saharan Africa has been scrutinized only marginally by academia. Moreover, empirical research on the impact of the institutional context has been scant, despite its attributed importance for CSR. Our article seeks to fill a part of this research gap by investigating CSR website reporting of 211 companies in seven sub-Saharan countries. The (...)
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  • Effect of Stakeholders’ Pressure on Transparency of Sustainability Reports within the GRI Framework.Belen Fernandez-Feijoo, Silvia Romero & Silvia Ruiz - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 122 (1):53-63.
    Transparency is a quality of corporate social responsibility communication that enhances the relationship between the investors and the company. The objective of this paper is to analyze if the transparency of the sustainability reports is affected by the relationship of companies in different industries with their stakeholders. If this were the case, it would indicate that the pressure of significant stakeholders determines the required level of transparency of the reports. We find that the pressure of some groups of stakeholders improves (...)
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  • Toward a More Coherent Understanding of the Organization–Society Relationship: A Theoretical Consideration for Social and Environmental Accounting Research.Jennifer C. Chen & Robin W. Roberts - 2010 - Journal of Business Ethics 97 (4):651-665.
    In this study we analyze the overlapping perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory. Our purpose is to explore how these theories can inform and be built upon by one another. Through our analysis we provide a broader theoretical understanding of these theories that may support and promote social and environmental accounting research. This article starts with a detailed analysis of legitimacy theory by bringing some recent critical discussions on legitimacy and corporations in the management (...)
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  • Initiating Disclosure of Environmental Liability Information: An Empirical Analysis of Firm Choice. [REVIEW]Jennifer C. Chen, Charles H. Cho & Dennis M. Patten - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 125 (4):1-12.
    This paper investigates potential motivations for late adopting U.S. companies to begin disclosing environmental liability amounts in their financial statements. Based on a review of 10-K reports filed from 1998 through 2012, inclusive, we identified 55 firms initiating environmental liability disclosure over the period, with all but three doing so by 2006. Focusing on the disclosers up through 2006, we argue that the companies may have used the disclosure as a tool of impression management to avoid potential stakeholder mis-estimation of (...)
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  • Corporate Governance Quality and CSR Disclosures.MuiChing Carina Chan, John Watson & David Woodliff - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 125 (1):1-15.
    Given the increasing importance attached to both corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate governance, this study investigates the association between these two complimentary mechanisms used by companies to enhance relations with stakeholders. Consistent with both legitimacy and stakeholder theory and controlling for industry profile, firm size, stockholder power/dispersion, creditor power/leverage, and economic performance, our analysis of the annual reports for a sample of 222 listed companies suggests that firms providing more CSR information: have better corporate governance ratings; are larger; belong (...)
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  • Disclosure Responses to a Corruption Scandal: The Case of Siemens AG.Renata Blanc, Charles H. Cho, Joanne Sopt & Manuel Castelo Branco - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 156 (2):545-561.
    In the current study, we examine the changes in disclosure practices on compliance and the fight against corruption at Siemens AG, a large German multinational corporation, over the period 2000–2011 during which a major corruption scandal was revealed. More specifically, we conduct a content analysis of the company’s annual reports and sustainability reports during that period to investigate the changes of Siemens’ corruption and compliance disclosure using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Through the lens of legitimacy theory, stakeholder analysis, and (...)
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  • Role of Country- and Firm-Level Determinants in Environmental, Social, and Governance Disclosure.Maria Baldini, Lorenzo Dal Maso, Giovanni Liberatore, Francesco Mazzi & Simone Terzani - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 150 (1):79-98.
    In recent years, companies receive pressure to release environmental, social, and governance disclosure, since these are perceived as critical issues by society. Despite this pressure, ESG disclosure practices considerably vary by firm. Prior academic literature investigated country- and firm-level factors determining such variation, alternatively adopting the institutional and legitimacy theory. By combining these theories in a unique framework, this study investigates the extent to which social structures and social legitimization influence ESG disclosure practices and each pillar. Results obtained using a (...)
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