This study examines the social and environmental disclosures of BHP Ltd (one of the largest Australian companies) from 1983 to 1997 to ascertain the extent and type of annual report social and environmental disclosures over the period, and whether such disclosures can be explained by the concepts of a social contract and legitimacy theory. This research is also motivated by the opportunity to compare and contrast results with those of Guthrie and Parker, in whose study the social and environmental disclosures made by BHP Ltd were also the focus of analysis. In testing the relationship between community concern for particular social and environmental issues (as measured by the extent of media attention), and BHP's annual report disclosures on the same issues, significant positive correlations were obtained for the general themes of environment and human resources as well as for various sub-issues within these, and other, themes. Additional testing also supported the view that management release positive social and environmental information in response to unfavourable media attention. Such results lend support to legitimation motives for a company's social and environmental disclosures. A trend in providing greater social and environmental information in the annual report of BHP in recent years, and its variable pattern, was also evidenced.
The idea of children’s vulnerability played a critical role in motivating the adoption of the un Convention on the Rights of a Child, but should vulnerability provide the basis for special human rights for children? Are children especially vulnerable relative to adults? This article seeks to explore the idea of children’s vulnerability in understanding the concept of children’s rights. It argues that vulnerability is not a condition peculiar to children. At the same time it recognizes that children experience special vulnerabilities relative to adults. It is these vulnerabilities that provide a justification for the special rights accorded to them under the Convention. The characterisation of children as vulnerable carries the risk that they will be defined by their vulnerabilities. To address the unintended consequences of a vulnerability paradigm, there is a need to expand the conception of children in a way that recognises their evolving capacities and right to participation.
The conceptual foundations of children’s rights remain under theorized. This paper develops a social interest theory of rights to offer a justification for the conception of rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It reveals that this conception is capable of producing a culturally sensitive, dynamic, inclusive and relational conception of rights that remedies many of the deficiencies associated with the traditional conception of human rights as being Western, individualistic trumps.
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