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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether corporate community involvement disclosures (CCID) in annual reports can be construed as a measure of corporate community development (CCD) or a mere signal of corporate social responsibility (CSR) observance.

Using content analysis and a quality score index, the study examined a panel data set covering the period from 1999 to 2008. The data was collected from a sample of 270 annual reports of 27 UK companies taken from the top 100 companies for corporate responsibility (BITC ranking, 2008). The research framework involves the use of signalling theory to investigate the information content of CCID.

It is found that the volume of corporate community disclosure (CCID) has a significant association with its total quality score (TQS) although the impact was found to be very small. CCID was also found to be strongly and positively associated with the volume of total CSR disclosed in annual reports. Hence the quantity and quality of CCID in annual reports increased significantly as the quantity of CSR disclosure also increased. Furthermore, the TQS was found to respond to company size and Corporate Governance measures such as audit committee size and board composition, and the existence of standalone CSR Reports, while other measures of public pressure such as leverage, profitability and industrial sector were not statistically significantly related with TQS.

This paper contributes to CSR literature in general and CCID literature in particular. The originality stems from the fact that it employs a signalling framework and a panel study approach as opposed to cross‐sectional only or time‐series only data to examine a less researched social disclosure – corporate community involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse changes in community disclosures by listed companies in Mauritius.

The authors carried out a quantitative and qualitative assessment of annual report disclosures over the period 2004-2010. In particular, the authors consider the influence of a corporate governance code and a government intervention to first persuade and subsequently mandate corporate social responsibility investment (known as a “CSR Levy”).

From a predominantly limited and neutral form of communication, narratives of community involvement morph into assertive and rhetorical statements, emphasising commitment, permanency and an intimate connection to the community and a re-organisation of activities and priorities which seek to portray structure and order in the way companies deliver community interventions. Informed by Gray et al.’s (1995) neo-pluralist framework and documentary evidence pertaining to the country’s social, political and economic context, the authors relate the change in disclosures to the use of corporate impression management techniques with a view to maintain legitimacy and to counter the predominant public narrative on the insufficient extent of community involvement by local companies.

The authors find that community disclosures are not only legitimating mechanisms driven by international pressures but are also the result of local tensions and expectations.

This study provides evidence on forms of “social” – as opposed to environmental – disclosures. Furthermore, it examines a unique setting where a government enacted a legally binding regime for greater corporate social involvement.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the community and environment disclosures and the long-run share price performance of Malaysian initial public offering (IPO) companies.

This study used secondary data through the content analysis of the annual reports and DataStream of 115 sampled IPOs listed on Bursa Malaysia from 2007 to 2015. The present study incorporated weighted least squares and quantile least squares to evaluate the relationship between the community and environment disclosures and IPO performance.

The results show a positive and significant relationship between the extent and quality of community disclosures and IPO performance; while the extent and quality of environment disclosures have a negative and positive relationship, respectively, with IPO performance. These results suggest that community and environmental activities can be considered an effort to enhance Malaysian IPOs.

These results suggest that Malaysian IPO companies should be involved consistently in corporate social responsibility disclosure, i.e. community and environmental activities, as they have a significant impact on the performance of Malaysian IPOs. The findings can facilitate financial institutions and regulatory agencies in driving companies to be more responsible regarding community and environmental disclosures.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides new insights into the relationship between the community and environment disclosures and the performance of Malaysian IPO companies.

This paper aims to study individuals’ information service satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in China’s urban communities.

The researchers analyse people’s uncertainties during the pandemic and argue that uncertainties caused by the lockdown can negatively affect people. By reducing people’s uncertainty during the pandemic, community staff members can improve individuals’ information service satisfaction and social order. This study constructs a conceptual model that includes key transparency and self-disclosure constructs and their relationships that can contribute to the trust and satisfaction of the community information service phenomenon. The researchers collected 489 responses to test their hypothesis from an online survey of Chinese residents in areas where the strict lockdown policy was implemented.

The empirical results show that policy and goods information transparency significantly affect information service satisfaction in a positive way, with goods information transparency having the highest impact. Second, self-disclosure of community staff members is also an effective way to increase information service satisfaction. Finally, trust plays a mediating role in the influence of information transparency and self-disclosure on information service satisfaction.

This paper innovatively uses uncertainty reduction theory to examine the effects of information transparency and self-disclosure on satisfaction with community information services. It expands the research in the field of information service satisfaction and extends the scope of the research subjects of self-disclosure.

This study examines the social and environmental disclosures of BHP Ltd (one of the largest Australian companies) from 1983 to 1997 to ascertain the extent and type of annual report social and environmental disclosures over the period, and whether such disclosures can be explained by the concepts of a social contract and legitimacy theory. This research is also motivated by the opportunity to compare and contrast results with those of Guthrie and Parker, in whose study the social and environmental disclosures made by BHP Ltd were also the focus of analysis. In testing the relationship between community concern for particular social and environmental issues (as measured by the extent of media attention), and BHP’s annual report disclosures on the same issues, significant positive correlations were obtained for the general themes of environment and human resources as well as for various sub‐issues within these, and other, themes. Additional testing also supported the view that management release positive social and environmental information in response to unfavourable media attention. Such results lend support to legitimation motives for a company’s social and environmental disclosures. A trend in providing greater social and environmental information in the annual report of BHP in recent years, and its variable pattern, was also evidenced.

This study examines whether relational capital influences self-disclosure behavior through the mechanism of needs-based motivation in virtual communities.

This study adopts hierarchical linear model (HLM) to differentiate between the relationships at different levels, with 378 online questionnaires recovered from 42 virtual communities.

The results show that group-level relational capital is positively related to self-disclosure and affects it through the partially mediating mechanism of motivation. Relational capital also strengthens the positive influence of the need to be on trend on individual self-disclosure behavior.

This study makes four research contributions. Firstly, we identify the means by which relational capital established within a virtual community influences user disclosure behavior. This focus differs from those of previous studies, which have emphasized privacy and security of information systems, cost–benefit considerations, and/or adopted personality traits as the research basis. Secondly, this study examines and verifies the mediating mechanism of motivation, establishing an alternative perspective for theoretical studies, and providing future studies with a reference for investigating the self-disclosure behavior of members. Thirdly, this research introduces and verifies the moderating effects of relational capital based on member relationships, thus making further theoretical and empirical contributions. Finally, we adopt HLM to conduct our analyses, thereby ensuring higher precision regarding the explanatory power of group-level explanatory variables for individual-level dependent variables.

The study examines the social and environmental responsibility indicators disclosed by three International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) corporate mining members in their social and environmental reporting (SER) from 2006 to 2014. To achieve this aim, the author limits the data two years before (i.e. from 2006 to 2007) and six years after (i.e. from 2009 to 2014) the implementation of the Sustainable Development Framework in the mining sector in 2008.

Using the techniques of content analysis and interpretive textual analysis, this study examines 27 social and environmental responsibility reports published between 2006 and 2014 by three ICMM corporate mining members. The study develops a disclosure index based on the earlier work of Hackston and Milne (1996), together with other disclosure items suggested in the extant literature and considered appropriate for this work. The disclosure index for this study comprised six disclosure categories (“employee”, “environment”, “community involvement”, “energy”, “governance” and “general”). In each of the six disclosure categories, only 10 disclosure items were chosen and that results in 60 disclosure items.

A total of 830 out of a maximum of 1,620 social and environmental responsibility indicators, representing 51% (168 employees, 151 environmental, 145 community involvement, 128 energy, 127 governance and 111 general) were identified and examined in company SER. The study showed that the sample companies relied on multiple strategies for managing pragmatic legitimacy and moral legitimacy via disclosures. Such practices raise questions regarding company-specific disclosure policies and their possible links to the quality/quantity of their disclosures. The findings suggest that managers of mining companies may opt for “cherry-picking” and/or capitalise on events for reporting purposes as well as refocus on company-specific issues of priority in their disclosures. While such practices may appear appropriate and/or timely to meet stakeholders’ needs and interests, they may work against the development of comprehensive reports due to the multiple strategies adopted to manage pragmatic and moral legitimacy.

A limitation of this research is that the author relied on self-reported corporate disclosures, as opposed to verifying the activities associated with the claims by the sample mining companies.

The findings from this research will help future social and environmental accounting researchers to operationalise Suchman’s typology of legitimacy in other contexts.

With growing large-scale mining activity, potential social and environmental footprints are obviously far from being socially acceptable. Powerful and legitimacy-conferring stakeholders are likely to disapprove such mining activity and reconsider their support, which may threaten the survival of the mining company and also create a legitimacy threat for the whole mining industry.

This study innovates by focusing on Suchman’s (1995) typology of legitimacy framework to interpret SER in an industry characterised by potential social and environmental footprints – the mining industry.

The aim of this paper is to establish a linkage between negative global media news towards Grameen Bank (GB), the largest microfinance organisation in the developing world, and the extent and type of annual report social performance disclosures by GB, over the nine‐year period 1997‐2005.

Content analysis instruments are utilised to analyse GB annual report social disclosure.

The study finds that GB's community poverty alleviation disclosures account for the highest proportion of total social disclosures in the period 1997‐2005. The results of this study are particularly significant in relation to poverty alleviation – the issue attracting severe criticism from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ ) late in 2001. The community poverty alleviation disclosures by GB are significantly greater over the four years following the negative news in the WSJ than in the four years before. The results suggest that GB responds to a negative media story or legitimacy threatening news via annual report social disclosures in an attempt to re‐establish its legitimacy.

This paper contributes to the literature because in the past there has been no research published linking global media attention to the social disclosure practices of major organisations in developing countries.

This research investigates the influence of corporate–NGO collaborations on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure measured in three different ways (i.e. extent, level and quality) in low-income developing economies. Additionally, it examines the moderating effect of corporate profitability in the relationship between corporate–NGO collaborations and CSR disclosure.

This research uses multivariate regression analysis based on data collected from 201 non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSE).

The findings reveal that corporations with NGO partnerships are more likely to disclose CSR information and provide high-quality information regarding workers, the environment and community-related issues. Further, corporate profitability positively moderates the corporate–NGO collaborations and CSR disclosure relationship.

Research limitations are presented in the conclusion section.

The findings underline the crucial significance of NGOs and their associated normative isomorphism logics for CSR disclosure in low-income countries with weak law enforcement and relatively ineffective state institutions, which were previously believed to lack such institutions.

While some research has suggested that companies in developing countries perceive significant pressure from NGOs to adopt social disclosure, no study has specifically explored how internally driven corporate–NGO collaboration (as opposed to external NGO activist pressures) promotes CSR disclosure specifically in developing economies.