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EMERGING TRENDS IN CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR) REPORTING BY LARGE CORPORATIONS:
Ferns, Bill Sethi, S. Prakash
Ferns, Bill
Sethi, S. Prakash
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Abstract
The last decade has witnessed rapid growth in the publication of corporate non-financial reports. These reports are variously called corporate social responsibility, global citizenship, or sustainability reports; we will use the term ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) reports to cover the entire genre. As the number, length, and diversity of these reports have steadily increased, this growth has been accompanied by serious research that attempts to evaluate the textual substance and comprehensiveness of the issues covered. Our presentation will describe an analytic framework called the CSR Monitor©, which we have developed to evaluate the substantive character of the CSR reports of large corporations, notably multi-national corporations (MNCs). In addition, in this paper we present results from these data focusing on MNCs from Western Europe and North America. Our findings suggest that, in general, companies from Europe had a higher rate of publishing CSR reports when compared with companies from North America, particularly those companies in the United States. We also found that there the quality of CSR reports varied from country to country within Western Europe, but compared to their North American counterparts, as a group Western European companies provided greater detail about issues in their CSR reports. This paper will provide analyses of the overall CSR Monitor scores, as well as a sample analysis of the CSR Monitor’s ‘Sustainability and Environment’ scale. It also reveals that third party assurance is still underutilized in many CSR reports. Last, the report provides several examples of how the CSR Monitor can be used to aid stakeholders in comparing the quality of disclosures in CSR reports.
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2012
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With permission of the license/copyright holder