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In recent years the concept of corporate social responsibility has gained prominence among academics from a wide range of disciplines. According to the Green Paper issued by the Commission of the European Communities in July 2001, corporate social responsibility is defined as a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis. The problem is how firms have made known the information on corporate social responsibility. With this in mind, in the present work we were prompted to analyse the relevance of corporate social responsibility in Spanish firms. To perform this study we examined some Spanish firms that present information about corporate social responsibility according to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework. Certain relevant conclusions about corporate social responsibility indicate that the disclosure of information about corporate social responsibility and the elaboration of the Sustainability Report in Spanish firms has been increasing and improving in recent years, that some of the most relevant information is economic, social and environmental, the environmental aspect being the most outstanding, and that of the firms analysed, Inditex (manufacturing industries) and Telefonica (communications) are the ones reporting the best information.

This study sets out to investigate the perception of different users of corporate information about the notion of the accountability process and the possibility of widening the scope of the current corporate annual report in Qatar to include social responsibility information. To achieve this objective, four user groups were invited to take part in the study. The outcome of the analysis revealed that most of those who took part in the study would like to see corporate social responsibility information disclosed, either in a separate section, or as part of the board of directors’ statement within the annual report. To achieve accountability, the respondents believe that a law that encourages the disclosure of corporate social responsibility information should be introduced, and different parties within the society should have the right to such information.

The growing public concern that private corporations should not only earn reasonable profits and provide fair returns to shareholders, but also operate as good corporate citizens and socially responsible organizations, has spread to the largest transnational corporations (TNCs), and seems to have been taken up by companies in both richer and poorer countries. Sustainable development calls for people and organizations to meet their present needs in such a way that does not hinder future generations’ ability to do the same. Many TNCs are creating voluntary environmental programs to manage more effectively the environmental impacts of their plants, facilities, and operations. These initiatives are especially important in developing countries with hazardous environmental conditions, social conditions, and non‐existent or poorly implemented regulatory protection.

Based on the text mining tools, this paper aims to propose a new method to evaluate the subjectivity and objectivity of corporate social responsibility information disclosure.

The authors build up a text subjectivity evaluation model of corporate social responsibility reports through meta-analysis; a text mining is conducted to all sample CSR reports released by Chinese listed companies untill March 2016[1]. Furthermore, the authors made an overall and quantitative analysis of the situation which contained changing state, characteristics and abnormal value on the subjectivity and objectivity of information disclosure.

The results show that the subjectivity scores of social responsibility reports of Chinese listed companies are generally in a normal distribution. The diagram turns out to be a rising trend over the years and increases linearly from 2011 to 2013. Also, the industry heterogeneity and policy control are the main reasons for the formation of the differences, which are significant between different industries and different years.

This paper provides not only an important empirical basis for the research of corporate social responsibility but also a new idea for the non-financial information disclosure as well as objective evaluation of normative text.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate governance characteristics, namely the board size, board independence, duality, audit committee, ten largest shareholders, managerial ownership, foreign ownership and government ownership and the extent of corporate social responsibility disclosure.

The content analysis was used to extract the CSR disclosure items from annual report and companies' web sites. Then, a CSR disclosure index was constructed after combining CSR disclosure items disclosed both in annual reports and in companies' web sites. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the relationship between the corporate social disclosures index and the independent variables, namely the board size, board independence, duality, audit committee, ten largest shareholders, managerial ownership, foreign ownership and government ownership after statistically controlling the effects of a firm's size and the profitability of the companies.

Results based on the full regression models indicated that only two variables were associated with the extent of disclosures, namely government ownership and audit committee. Government ownership and audit committee are positively and significantly correlated with the level of corporate social responsibility disclosure. The most significant variable that influences the level of CSR disclosure is government ownership.

The findings are limited to the context of the study and it was limited to Malaysian public listed companies, January to December 2006. The sources of data in this study were companies' annual reports and web sites only.

The study is useful to organizations and statutory bodies to take into consideration in identifying the corporate governance characteristics that will enhance CSR disclosure, since it had been shown in previous studies that corporate social responsibility reporting in Malaysia is generally low. The government can determine how important it is that a company should be willing to allocate their costs towards corporate social responsibility activities. Thus, this study will emphasize the level of activities through corporate social responsibility reporting in Malaysian public listed companies and help the government to ascertain the level of corporate social responsibility activities through corporate social responsibility reporting among Malaysian public listed companies.

The study reveals the extent of the disclosure of corporate social responsibility to companies web sites and constructed the CSR index based on two sources of data, namely companies' web sites and annual reports.

This paper aims to examine the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting quality and board characteristics on corporate social reputation of Chinese listed firms.

Firms chosen for this study are drawn from a social responsibility ranking list of Chinese listed firms. The social responsibility rating scores identified by this ranking list are used to measure the social reputation of firms studied. The model-testing method is used to examine hypothesised relationships between CSR reporting quality, board characteristics and corporate social reputation.

The results indicate that CSR reporting quality positively influences corporate social reputation but chief executive officer/chairman duality as a measure of board characteristics has a negative impact on corporate social reputation. Firm’s financial performance and firm size also positively influence corporate social reputation.

The relatively small sample of firms for a cross-sectional study, and the proxies constructed for various concepts to empirically test hypotheses can limit generalising findings to firms outside the social responsibility ranking list. Future studies can undertake longitudinal analysis and compare socially responsible firms with others to expand empirical findings about corporate social reputation.

This paper investigates the influences of CSR reporting quality and board characteristics on corporate social reputation in the context of a developing country, China.

The aim of this paper is to determine corporate social reporting practices and to examine the type and extent of such reporting in the corporate reports of manufacturing companies in Swaziland over a period of two years from 2007 to 2008. This paper also aims to examine the various areas of social practices in which companies are involved.

The study uses questionnaires and corporate reports to gather information from 30 selected manufacturing companies. This research uses content analysis of corporate reports as a method to measure the extent and nature of corporate social reporting according to the number of words disclosed over the two‐year period.

Findings show that the concept of corporate social responsibility is fairly new in Swaziland and very few companies disclose corporate social responsibility information in corporate reports. However, the study finds that there is a trend of increasing corporate social responsibility information disclosures among the companies from 2007 to 2008.

The increasing trend of corporate social responsibility information disclosures indicates a positive step towards the further development of corporate social responsibility information reporting practice in Swaziland as well as other developing African countries.

The study makes an important contribution to the knowledge of corporate social responsibility in Swaziland. In addition, it also elaborates the perspective for a greater understanding of the social obligations that corporate entities owe to their stakeholders and society in general.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debate on governance, accountability, transparency and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the mining sector of a developing country context. It examines the reporting practices of the two largest transnational gold-mining companies in Tanzania in order to draw attention to the role played by local government regulations and advocacy and campaigning by nationally organised non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with respect to promoting corporate social reporting practices.

The paper takes a political economy perspective to consider the serious implications of the neo-liberal ideologies of the global capitalist economy, as manifested in Tanzania’s regulatory framework and in NGO activism, for the corporate disclosure, accountability and responsibility of transnational companies (TNCs). A qualitative field case study methodology is adopted to locate the largely unfamiliar issues of CSR in the Tanzanian mining sector within a more familiar literature on social accounting. Data for the case study were obtained from interviews and from analysis of documents such as annual reports, social responsibility reports, newspapers, NGO reports and other publicly available documents.

Analysis of interviews, press clips and NGO reports draws attention to social and environmental problems in the Tanzanian mining sector, which are arguably linked to the manifestation of the broader crisis of neo-liberal agendas. While these issues have serious impacts on local populations in the mining areas, they often remain invisible in mining companies’ social disclosures. Increasing evidence of social and environmental ills raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the regulatory frameworks, as well as the roles played by NGOs and other pressure groups in Tanzania.

By empowering local NGOs through educational, capacity building, technological and other support, NGOs’ advocacy, campaigning and networking with other civil society groups can play a pivotal role in encouraging corporations, especially TNCs, to adopt more socially and environmentally responsible business practices and to adhere to international and local standards, which in turn may help to improve the lives of many poor people living in developing countries in general, and Tanzania in particular.

This paper contributes insights from gold-mining activities in Tanzania to the existing literature on CSR in the mining sector. It also contributes to political economy theory by locating CSR reporting within the socio-political and regulatory context in which mining operations take place in Tanzania. It is argued that, for CSR reporting to be effective, robust regulations and enforcement and stronger political pressure must be put in place.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how social power and pressures over the past century have shifted the audience towards which organizations find themselves accountable, as reflected in their social responsibility reporting.

The authors use historical analysis to analyze qualitatively the annual reports of prominent US organizations between the 1900s to the early 2000s. Adopting an integrationist perspective, the authors ground their research in stakeholder theory and reviewed passages in annual reports identifying the audiences of socially responsible organizational initiatives.

The study revealed that the degree and focus of corporate accountability shifted over the course of the 1900s, and that this change was due to shifts in influence and power stemming from different stakeholders. During the early 1900s, organizations were more concerned with pleasing internal stakeholders (i.e. employees); however, economic and social events shifted this attention towards external stakeholder groups (i.e. the environment) during the latter part of the century. More recent events fueled social pressures, resulting in legislation and social reporting guidelines during the first decade of the twenty‐first century.

Organizations will continue to be held accountable as new stakeholder groups emerge and different social movements and economic changes transpire, exerting more pressure on organizations to be socially responsible. Furthermore, organizations need to remain current on social reporting guidelines, as these increasingly become the means of communication with multiple stakeholder groups. In summary, findings suggest that organizations would benefit by staying abreast of economic and social cues when developing their socially responsible initiatives and reporting.

The unique contribution of this paper is to identify how economic and social events place pressure on organizations and shift organizational attention through an accountability mechanism, resulting in changes in the focus of social responsibility reporting.

The basic purpose of this research is to compare and describe various aspects related to student perceptions of forest industry CR performance in Finland and the USA.

With a quantitative research method, this study investigated 568 students. CSR and CSR reporting are the fundamental concepts that shape the development of the hypotheses and thus are integral to this empirical study.

Finnish students have a stronger belief that reporting is reliable and open than their US counterparts. Finnish students show more positive views on the way forest industry companies implement environmental responsibility than their US counterparts. US students show more positive views on social responsibility, especially those connected with stakeholder relations, than their Finnish counterparts.

The obvious connections between reporting views and perceptions of corporate responsibility highlight the significance of reliable reporting in the context of CR. Major fields of study significantly affected student perceptions of CR. The results of the study can help schools and enterprises to design proper CR‐related education courses or programs. Results of this study indicate that the CR weakness of the industry still lies in environmental responsibility. Thus, while forest industry companies should strive to apply a multi‐dimensional CR strategy, emphasis should still be on the environmental component.