Purpose – The aim of the paper is to describe and explain, using a combination of interviews and content analysis, the social and environmental reporting practices of a major garment export organisation within a developing country. Design/methodology/approach – Senior executives from a major...

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to critically evaluate membership of the FTSE4Good “socially responsible investment” indices (membership of which is based on ethical criteria), which were launched in the UK in July 2001 as a means of increased accountability and change....

Purpose – This paper aims to analyze so‐called sustainability, corporate social responsibility or citizenship reports, as artefacts of a compromise between an institutional entrepreneur (IE), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and companies. Some companies take on this invitation but to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an in‐depth, context rich, and stakeholder‐focused perspective on the legitimation dynamics surrounding the initiation and evolution of one of the key financial sector environmental and social responsibility initiatives in recent years, the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document organizations' self descriptions of why they initiated sustainable development (SD) reporting and explore these explanations using an institutional theory framework. Design/methodology/approach – Constructs organizational narratives from...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the presentation medium of corporate social and environmental web site disclosure has an impact on user trust in such disclosure, and to examine the effect of media richness on user perception about corporate social and environmental...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the voluntary social and environmental disclosures made in the annual reports of Rothmans Ltd between the years of 1955 and 1999. The first part of the paper focuses on defining legitimacy theory as it has been used in accounting research,...

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the social aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by studying a case of organizational downsizing. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a theoretical framework consisting of stakeholder theory and legitimacy...

Purpose – This paper aims to respond to recent calls to rethink the concept of managerial capture as it has been used to date to explore and explain the limited impacts of new forms of stakeholder engagement. Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores the grounding of views of...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate whether corporate social disclosure levels relate to national cultures. Design/methodology/approach – The sample consisted of 600 large companies from 22 countries. Cultural measures were applied: a measure for secrecy, as proposed by...