Analyzing the corporate social responsibility disclosures of selected companies in India

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent, quantity and quality of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures made by the top Indian companies in their annual reports. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes the annual reports of the top 137 companies from CNX-500, over ten years, from 2008 to 2017. The technique of content analysis has been employed manually to examine the number of CSR activities disclosed, quantity and quality of CSR disclosures made by the selected companies in their annual reports. Also mean, percentages, trend analysis and analysis of variance have been employed to analyze the disclosures. Findings This study highlights that there is a continuous increase in the quantity of disclosures and the number of CSR activities disclosed by Indian companies over the selected period. It also observed that among the selected themes, most disclosed CSR activities are from “customer theme” and “community development theme.” Findings regarding the quality of CSR disclosures revealed that the “qualitative disclosures with specific information” are preferred most by the companies within India. Also, there is a significant variation in the quantity of CSR disclosures across the selected eight themes. Originality/value As most of the prior literature on CSR disclosures focused on developed countries in comparison to developing ones, this study contributes to the existing literature by carrying out an extensive investigation of this concept among the Indian companies. Moreover, there are very few studies addressing such a scientific inquiry in the Indian context, especially after the introduction of amendments in the Companies Act, 2013. Furthermore, this study utilizes a comprehensive research instrument consisting of a total of 178 CSR activities, divided across eight themes for collecting data on disclosures from the annual reports. This instrument can be used in the future studies on CSR disclosures in other developing countries as well.

Analyzing the impact of corporate social responsibility on corporate financial performance: evidence from top Indian firms

“…The technique of content analysis has been most widely used to analyze annual reports of the companies for measuring social responsibility disclosures (Guthrie and Parker, 1989;Gray et al, 1995Gray et al, , 2001Hackston and Milne, 1996;Milne and Adler, 1999;Williams and Pei, 1999;Newson and Deegan, 2002;Birindelli et al, 2015;Venturelli et al, 2018;Sekhon and Kathuria, 2019).Content analysis is an objective procedure for codifying text of a piece of writing into various categories depending on the selection criteria (Cochran and Wood, 1984;Odera et al, 2016). In this study, the technique of content analysis was used manually, by recording scores manually on the research instrument, based on the type of disclosures in the annual report of each company, for each selected year.…”

Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure and Financial Performance of Shariah PLCS in Malaysia

“…The last few decades have witnessed an increased interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Prior studies showed that there is an increasing number of interest in CSRD study since the 1980s (Hassan, 2013;Sekhon and Kathuria, 2019). Today, various stakeholder groups are starting to require financial companies to provide information on social and environmental issues.…”

A Conceptual Framework on the Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: Profitability, Leverage and Company Size

“…Corporate social responsibility assumes that the company will convey information for the benefit of the state to be included in its social responsibility plans for society and the environment (Lone, Ali and Khan, 2016). From year to year, the number of companies reporting their social responsibility plans has experienced a large increase (Sekhon and Kathuria, 2019). CSR disclosure practices in Indonesia have received considerable attention.…”