Do different industries report Corporate Social Responsibility differently? An investigation through the lens of stakeholder theory

Abstract

The social responsibility of business has become a major issue in recent years and the reporting of such activity is becoming more prevalent. Companies are attuning to the benefits of being seen as socially responsibly and many industries are jumping on the bandwagon of reporting CSR and using different media to communicate their activities in this arena to their stakeholders. This paper considers the content of one type of such communications, the annual report, and looks at how organisations are taking a focused stakeholder view of CSR rather than a wider view as would be expected from the ambiguity of definitions of the concept. Differences in reporting practices were found by an analysis of the annual and CSR reports of 28 FTSE4Good firms focusing on a variety of industries. Findings show that there is a significant difference between how organisations in different industries report on CSR consistent with a stakeholder view of CSR, and that this reporting follows for the most part the expectations of the CSR communications literature. It is suggested that firms report on CSR in line with what their key stakeholders expect, thus giving evidence for CSR reporting as another tool in the marketing communicators toolbox.

Trends and determinants of corporate non-financial disclosure in Greece

“…Consistent with earlier work (e.g. see Sweeney and Coughlan, 2008;Holder-Webb et al, 2009;Morhardt, 2010), our assessment further confirms noticeable variation across sectors regarding their propensity to disclose non-financial information. More comprehensive environmental disclosures by industrial firms have been also identified in the recent studies of Liu and Anbumozhi (2009), da Silva Monteiro and Aibar-Guzmán (2010) Andrikopoulos and Kriklani (2012).…”

Corporate social responsibility through sport: a longitudinal study of the FTSE100 companies

“…This technique has been widely employed in CSR research, and is the most common method of analysing social and environmental disclosure by firms (Gray et al, 1995;Milne and Adler, 1999). Content analysis is, at its simplest, a research technique used to determine the presence of certain words or concepts within a passage of text (Sweeney and Coughlan, 2008). In line with the methodological recommendations of Gray et al (1995), and given that a prerequisite for any research is some definition of the subject to be researched, we adopted the broad definition of sport as outlined in the Council of Europe's European Sports Charter (1992), where "sport means all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aims at improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships, or obtaining results in competition at all levels".…”

CSR Information Disclosure on the Web: A Context-Based Approach Analysing the Influence of Country of Origin and Industry Sector

“…More recent study identified significant difference between how organisations in different industry sectors communicate CSR through two distinct media: the web and annual reports (Sweeney and Coughan, 2008). There is also evidence that the country of origin of the corporation exercises an influence over CSR communication on the web, at least when companies in the oil industry were analysed for a comparative study between UK and Brazil (Farache et al, 2007a).…”