Purpose
Drawing on the phenomenological concepts of “empathy” and “communal emotions” developed by Edith Stein (1917, 1922), the purpose of this paper is to discuss the co-existence both of the legitimacy and accountability perspectives in voluntarily delivered social and environmental reporting (SER), based on different “levels of empathy” towards different stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper adopts an interpretive research design, drawn from Stein’s concept of empathy by using a mixed-method approach. A manual content analysis was performed on 393 cooperative banks’ (CB) social and environmental reports from 2005 to 2013 in Italy, and 14 semi-structured interviews.
Findings
The results show that CBs voluntarily disclose information in different ways to different stakeholders. According to Stein, the phenomenological concept of empathy, and its understanding within institutions, allows us to interpret these multiple perspectives within a single social and environmental report. Therefore, when the process of acquiring knowledge in the CB–stakeholder relationship is complete and mentalised (level 3, re-enactive empathy), the SER holds high informative power, consistent with the accountability perspective; on the contrary, when this process is peripheral and perceptional (level 1, basic empathy), the SER tends to provide more self-assessment information, attempting to portray the bank in a positive light, which is consistent with the legitimacy perspective.
Originality/value
The concept of empathy introduced in this paper can assist in interpreting the interactions between an organisation and different stakeholders within the same social and environmental report. Moreover, the approach adopted in this paper considers different stakeholders simultaneously, thus responding to previous concerns regarding the lack of focus on multiple stakeholders.
The so-called partition function is a sample moment statistic based on blocks of data and it is often used in the context of multifractal processes.It will be shown that its behaviour is strongly influenced by the tail of the distribution underlying the data either in i.i.d. and weakly dependent cases.These results will be exploited to develop graphical and estimation methods for the tail index of a distribution. The performance of the tools proposed is analyzed and compared with other methods by means of simulations and examples.
a b s t r a c tWe consider goodness-of-fit testing for multivariate stable distributions. The proposed test statistics exploit a characterizing property of the characteristic function of these distributions and are consistent under some conditions. The asymptotic distribution is derived under the null hypothesis as well as under local alternatives. Conditions for an asymptotic null distribution free of parameters and for affine invariance are provided. Computational issues are discussed in detail and simulations show that with proper choice of the user parameters involved, the new tests lead to powerful omnibus procedures for the problem at hand.
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