Quest for Alternative Sociological Perspectives on Corporate Social and Environmental Reporting

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to review existing dominant theoretical perspectives used in corporate social and environmental accounting research, identify their limitations and to suggest some alternative theoretical perspectives for further research.
 Methodology: In order to identify relevant research papers, on the use of different theoretical perspectives on corporate social and environmental accounting research, published in academic journals, different keywords were searched in google scholar. Research papers were then shortlisted according to their relevance to the topic.
 The results: Among all theoretical frameworks, there is a great variety but accounting researchers remained selective in heir use of the theory and some other aspects of the theory remained unexplored. Apart from this narrow application, repeated application of same theories, especially legitimacy and stakeholder theory) provide very little additional insights.
 Implication:
 The dominant theoretical perspectives on CSER do not fully capture the complexity of the phenomenon. This situation demands researchers to explore alternative theoretical perspectives for better and insightful research. The main contribution of this paper is that it suggests the theory of realistic evaluation (RE) and the institutional logics perspective (ILP) as alternative sociological perspectives. This paper invites future researchers to apply these theoretical frameworks and to explore their usefulness.

Coercive, Normative and Mimetic Pressures as Drivers of Environmental Management Accounting Adoption

“…The research is more significant in the context of developing countries, as a majority of the research in this area 2 of 14 focused on developed countries [10][11][12][13]. Finally, a majority of the research uses legitimacy theory and stakeholder's theory to explain the adoption of EMA while there is limited use of institutional theory [14]. In order to address these gaps, this paper aims to explore the drivers of EMA adoption in Pakistan using institutional theory.…”

Climate Change Reporting and Corporate Governance among Asian and African Energy Firms

“…Institutional theory is one of the most used theories in Corporate Social and Environmental Reporting (CSER) studies aside from the stakeholder theory and the legitimacy theory [11][12][13][14]. As a social theory [15], some researchers posit that the institutional theory provides relevant insights to explain why firms react to external pressures such as social structures, expectations and social institutions [16].…”

“…A limitation of the institutional theory, however, is that it focuses more on macro-level institutional structures that influence organizational practices rather than on individual and internal organizational dynamics that play a role in the process of institutionalization [11]. It is therefore important that internal perspectives within an organization are taken into consideration when examining institutional perspectives [26][27][28].…”

Emergent Typologies of Small Businesses in a Multi-ethnic Wet Market in Malaysia: A Phenomenological Study

“…The vast majority of research uses legitimacy theory, stakeholder"s theory and institutional theory as the main conceptual basis. This limited choice of theory has implications for the limited insights on CSER (Mahmood & Ahmad, 2015). Furthermore, research on the social impact of businesses traditionally focusses on large firms and attention on small businesses is only recently gaining traction (Quinn, 1997;Spence, 1999;Vyakarnam et al, 1997).…”