Cross‐sectional effects in community disclosure

By D. Campbell, G. Moore, Philip J. Shrives. 2006

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose – This paper seeks to address a gap in the literature in that it explores community disclosures in annual reports examining annual reports for 5 UK FTSE 100 sectors between, 1974 and 2000. Design/methodology/approach – The sample was bifurcated into types – those with higher public profile and those with lower public profile based on a measure of “proximity to end user”. Two approaches were adopted in the paper: longitudinal volumetric word count mean and frequency of disclosure by company. Findings – The two approaches demonstrated that community disclosure was positively associated with public profile. The findings are consistent with reporting behaviour found in other categories of voluntary disclosure, where disclosure has been found to be associated with the presumed information demands of specific stakeholders. Additionally the research supported a legitimacy theory-based explanation of cross-sectional variability in community disclosures. Illustrative disclosures from a number of companies are also presented in the paper. Research limitations/implications – Further areas of research are suggested by these findings. In addition to articulating the potential value of examining community disclosure patterns in other contexts (e.g. in other sectors and other national situations), and in other media (e.g. internet studies), the findings in this study suggest that there may be value in exploring the ways in which voluntary disclosure responds to other external structural variables. Originality/value – The contribution of this paper has been to show that a hitherto less-analysed category of voluntary social disclosure (community disclosure) is cross-sectionally responsive to the structural vulnerability of companies to issues associated with “general” social concern.

Subfields: Accounting, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b8e7ccc31aeb4b8722a15761a90db8916fa1b75

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Citations in the corpus

Black Economic Empowerment Disclosures by South African Listed Corporations: The Influence of Ownership and Board Characteristics (2012, methodology): “First, the study focuses on the nature and extent of BEE disclosures and as words are the smallest unit of measurement, they are robust both in terms of quality and quantity of disclosure (Campbell et al. 2006).”
Ethical Reporting in Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited (1983–2010) (2015, background): “It might also be related to the increased public visibility (Campbell et al. 2006) of IBBL in recent times.”
Corporate Governance and Performance in Socially Responsible Corporations: New Empirical Insights from a Neo‐Institutional Framework (2013, unknown): “As past evidence indicates that company size and industry affect CG and CSR practices (Collett & Hrasky, 2005; Campbell et al., 2003, 2006), we selected the largest 15 corporations from each of the five industries based on their market capitalisation in order to control for size and industry.”
Discharging not-for-profit accountability: UK charities and public discourse (2012, methodology): “, 1995a; Mäkelä and Näsi, 2010); and legitimacy theory (Deegan, 2002; Campbell et al., 2006; Tilling and Tilt, 2010).”
A Longitudinal Study of Corporate Social Disclosures in a Developing Economy (2011, background): “Haniffa and Cooke 2005; Campbell et al. 2006; Ratanajongkol et al. 2006).”
Changes in social and environmental reporting practices in an emerging economy (2004–2007): Exploring the relevance of stakeholder and legitimacy theories (2011, background): “Word counts are seen to be an appropriate reflection of the importance that companies attach to particular SER themes (Campbell et al., 2006; Gray et al., 1995a; Ratanajongkol et al., 2006; Wilmshurst & Frost, 2000) and have been found to be highly correlated to other measures, such as sentences or…”