Reports the results of a study on the social and environmental disclosure practices of New Zealand companies. In addition to providing an up‐to‐date description of such practices, and placing them in an international context, examines some potential determinants of these practices. Replicates and extends a recent US study (Patten, 1991). Makes improvements on Patten’s study by measuring the amount of disclosure as a continuous variable using both page amount and the number of sentences. The results indicate both measures are highly correlated. Consistent with Patten (1991) and other studies, reports that both company size and industry are significantly associated with social and environmental disclosures, and that profitability (both current and lagged) is not. In addition to these variables, provides some tentative evidence that New Zealand companies with dual (overseas) stock exchange listings are greater disclosers of social and environmental information.

This paper reports the results of a study designed to explore the inter-rater reliability of annual report social and environmental disclosures content analysis. Using the sentence-based coding instruments and decision rules adopted in Hackston and Milne (1996), this study reports the co-agreement levels reached by three coders over five rounds of testing 49 annual reports. Included amongst the three coders was a complete novice to both content analysis and social and environmental disclosure research. Krippendorff's (1980) reliability scores for the three coders are reported for many of the typical decisions taken by social and environmental disclosures content analysts. The study also provides a commentary on the implications of formal reliability analysis for past and future social and environmental disclosures content analyses, and exposes the complexities of formal reliability measurement. The overall findings suggest that the coded output from inexperienced coders using the Hackston and Milne approach with little or no prior training can be relied upon for aggregate total disclosures analysis. For more detailed sub-category analysis, however, the findings suggest a period of training for the less experienced codes with at least twenty reports appears necessary before their coded output could be relied upon.

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Purpose-Through an analysis of corporate sustainable development reporting, this paper seeks to examine critically language use and other visual (re)presentations of sustainable development within the business context. It aims to provide a framework to interpret and tease out business representations of sustainable development. Such representations are argued to be constitutive of the way that business has come to "know" and "do" sustainable development and, therefore, to constrain and enable particular actions and developments. Design/methodology/approach-The study uses a mix of synthesis, interpretive and discourse analysis to locate, interpret and critically analyse a corpus of written and presentational texts produced by a New Zealand business association and eight of its founding members' early triple bottom line reports. Findings-The business association and its members' reports are shown to present a pragmatic and middle-way discourse on business and the environment. Through the use of rhetorical claims to pragmatism and action, this discourse suggests that businesses are "doing" sustainability. But critical analysis and interpretation within a wider framework reveal a narrow, largely economic and instrumental approach to the natural environment. Originality/value-This paper offers a diagrammatic synthesis of the contested "middle ground" of the sustainable development debate, and thereby provides a frame of reference for further interpretational work on organisations and sustainable development.

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