CSR reporting and the UK financial services sector

Abstract

Purpose -Sector-specific guidelines have often been suggested as the way to encourage corporate social disclosure. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent to which disclosure in published annual reports of organisations within the financial services sector complies with their sector guidelines. Design/methodology/approach -The financial services sector can be broadly defined as consisting of three sub-sectors: Banks, Insurance Providers, and Building Societies, and the industry is dominated by a relatively small number of large mainstream providers. Here content analysis was used to investigate the disclosure of major banks, building societies and insurance providers, using their Annual Report and Accounts and, if published annually, their stand-alone CSR reports for the same period. Findings -Although the "moral" and "business-case" arguments should lead organisations to be accountable to their stakeholders in respect of their social and environmental impact, the level of disclosure is lamentably low across the financial services sector with an observable tendency for compliance to be related to size -the larger the organisation, the more likelihood of compliance, which might indicate a resource issue.Research limitations/implications -The nature of the enquiry did not permit an in-depth analysis of the motivations for extensive reporting. However, it allows the identification of those organisations seeking to legitimate or mediate perceptions of their behaviour, whereby only good news is reported by selective inclusion or exclusion of disclosure categories and issues. Originality/value -The paper contributes to the debate on whether sector-specific guidelines will increase the level and quality of corporate social disclosure.

Marxist Feminist Perspective of Corporate Gender Disclosures

“…Boesso and Kumar (2007) argued that content analysis has been the most widely applied method in research on accounting disclosures, and quantitative content analysis is considered as being more reliable (Day & Woodward 2009). The sustainability reports of the sample companies were accessed from the companies' websites.…”

The Influence of Ownership Concentration on Firm Resource Allocations to Employee Relations, External Social Actions, and Environmental Action

“…Considering that the literature has found that some sectors of the economy usually have more intense CSR activity, it is important to take the industry factor into account with the inclusion of sector dummies (SD) in the models (Day & Woodward, 2009). Additionally, year dummies (YD) have also been used to control for possible time events with effects on CSR.…”

Sustainability Assurance in Socially-Sensitive Sectors: A Worldwide Analysis of the Financial Services Industry

“…Moreover, the pioneers issuing in the 1980s and early-90s Environmental Reports belonged to the petrochemical sector. However, although there are several studies about sustainability reporting in 'socially-sensitive sectors' (see, for example, [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]), to the best of our knowledge, there is no evidence about research works that analyse the sustainability assurance in this kind of sectors. In this regard, our study finds to shed light into a clear research gap in the field, focusing on the financial services sector.…”