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This paper investigates the impact of sustainability information disclosure on consumers' choice of order-to-delivery lead-time in relation to consumers' sustainability concern.

Based on two choice experiments with participants from the Netherlands (n = 348) and the United Kingdom (n = 1,387), the impact of sustainability information disclosure was examined in connection with consumers' concerns for environmental and social sustainability. Information on environmental impact (carbon emission) and social impact (warehouse workers and drivers' well-being) was considered and compared.

Disclosing sustainability impact information significantly increased consumers' preference and choice for longer delivery times, with equivalent effects for environmental and social impact information. Consumers' relevant (environmental or social) sustainability concern as personality traits enhanced effects on preferences, as did priming of environmental concern.

Future research may consider differences between product categories or e-commerce companies' reputation in sustainability activities.

The findings provide opportunities for online retailers to influence consumer choice of delivery time, especially through disclosing environmental and/or social sustainability information.

This study fills a gap in the literature on sustainability information disclosure to actively steer consumer choice of delivery time, particularly regarding the effect of social sustainability impact information in comparison to its environmental counterpart.

To determine whether to entrust the European Union (EU) to create a new nonfinancial reporting framework or endorse the extant reporting framework developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), this study aims to explore whether the mandatory implementation of the EU Directive positively impacted the GRI-based environmental disclosure.

The authors compared the pre- and post-EU Directive environmental disclosure of 16 Italian environmentally sensitive companies. The authors used an extended coding scheme and developed a unique scoring system to compare the quantitative and qualitative changes in environmental disclosure.

The analysis showed that the quantity of environmental disclosure increased after the mandatory EU Directive adoption. The most significant change was observed regarding the disclosure topics explicitly required by the Italian legislature. Additionally, disclosure of soft information continued to prevail over that of hard information in the post-Directive period. While the Directive boosted the level of adherence to GRI standards, Italian companies disclosed information that could be easily mimicked (soft) instead of objective measures that could be verified (hard). In light of this evidence, the endorsement of extant GRI standards could be a valuable option for enhancing the comparability and transparency of environmental disclosure.

This study used an original extended coding system and proposed related environmental disclosure indexes that allow monitoring changes in environmental disclosure over time. To the authors’ best knowledge, this study is one of the few that justifies the significant impact of regulation (here the EU Directive) on the increase in environmental disclosure and that uses hard and soft information typology to examine the quality of environmental disclosure.

This paper aims to demonstrate methods that sustainability-conscious brands can use to include their primary producers in the measurement and reporting of the environment and sustainability performance of their supply chains. It explores three questions: How can farm businesses provide information required in sustainability reporting? What are the challenges and opportunities experienced in preparing and presenting the information? What future research and policy instruments might be needed to resolve these issues.

This study identifies and describes methods to provide the farm-level information needed for environmental performance and sustainability reporting frameworks. It demonstrates them by compiling natural capital accounts and environmental performance information for two wool producers in the grassy woodland biome of Eastern Australia; the contrasting history and management of these producers would be expected to result in different environmental performances.

The authors demonstrated an approach to NC accounting that is suitable for including primary producers in environmental performance reporting of supply chains and that can communicate whether individual producers are sustaining, improving or degrading their NC. Measurements suitable for informing farm management and for the estimation of supply chain performance can simultaneously produce information useful for aggregation to regional and national assessments.

The methods used should assist sustainability-conscious supply chains to more accurately assess the environmental performance of their primary producers and to use these assessments in selective sourcing strategies to improve supply chain performance. Empirical measures of environmental performance and natural capital have the potential to enable evaluation of the effectiveness of sustainability accounting frameworks in inducing businesses to reduce their environmental impacts and improve the condition of the natural capital they depend on.

Two significant social implications exist for the inclusion of primary producers in the sustainability and environmental performance reporting of supply chains. Firstly, it presently takes considerable time and expense for producers to prepare this information. Governments and members of the supply chain should acknowledge the value of this information to their organisations and consider sharing some of the cost of its preparation with primary producers. Secondly, the “additionality” requirement commonly present in existing frameworks may perversely exclude already high-performing producers from being recognised. The methods proposed in this paper provide a way to resolve this.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to describe detailed methods of collecting data for natural capital accounting and environmental performance reporting for individual farms and the first to compile the information and present it in a manner coherent with the Kering EP&L and the UN SEEA EA. The authors believe that this will make a significant contribution to the development of fair and standardised ways of measuring individual farm performance and the performance of food, beverage and apparel supply chains.

This study aims to examine whether there exists any relationship between corporate biodiversity reporting decision (CBRD) and corporate environmental performance (CEP).

The primary sample contains 442 firm-year observations over a period of 13 years (2008–2020) for 34 listed Finnish companies. Based on both legitimacy theory and voluntary disclosure theory, 2 logit regression models are estimated to test the CBRD–CEP nexus. CBRD is a dichotomous variable. Three proxies for CEP, namely propensity to emit greenhouse gas (GHG), propensity to consume water and propensity to generate waste are employed.

This study finds that firms having higher propensity to consume water and generate waste are inclined to release biodiversity-related information. The findings support legitimacy theory suggesting that firms with inferior environmental performance may decide on reporting biodiversity information for legitimation purpose.

The study uses Finnish data and hence, the results may lack in generalizability to other national contexts.

The results of this study should be valuable to policy makers for formulating mandatory biodiversity reporting standards to ensure disclosure of standard, extensive and authentic biodiversity-related information by companies. The results should also be valuable to corporate managers and eco-friendly investors.

Corporate biodiversity reporting (CBR) is an under-researched area of environmental accounting literature. Using the Finnish context, this paper extends the existing literature by investigating whether any association exists between CBRD and CEP, which has not been examined before.

With the increasing awareness of sustainability and its importance around the world, corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Africa also requires attention. Based on the stakeholder theory, this study aims to determine the relationship between CSR information received by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and CSR's diffusion and the mediating role of environmental awareness in Angola as a country representative of the African context.

The empirical study analyzes managers' perceptions of 131 SMEs in Angola. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is the method to assess the relationship between CSR information and its diffusion and the mediating role of environmental awareness SMEs in Angola.

The authors found strong evidence that CSR diffusion, and disclosure as one of CSR's related actions, heavily depends on the information received and managed by the firm. The authors also confirmed that environmental awareness puts pressure on SMEs to increase the SMEs' diffusion efforts.

The study points out the role of managers in promoting a responsible orientation of businesses in Angola for preserving the environment and improving the competitive success of SMEs.

The social, economic and legal contexts of Angola are vulnerable. The findings raise concerns about whether governments and regulatory efforts improve the development of the strategies toward social responsibility of African firms and whether these firms also increase the role of SMEs in producing positive outcomes through CSR.

The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the features of the strategic orientation of SMEs in Angola, necessary to enhance CSR and protect the environment. The conclusions highlight the potential role of managers in promoting a culture of ethics, social innovation and successful competition change in businesses.

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 study visualizes the link between environment accounting & triple bottom line, quantitative environmental reporting & standard method, voluntary environmental disclosure & legal requirement, size of company & volume of environmental disclosure, material flow analysis & life cycle assessment to achieve sustainable development in Bangladeshi corporation. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to investigate the role of these factors to achieve sustainable development in Bangladeshi corporation. To investigate the role of these factors, ten factors that significantly contribute to achieve sustainable development were determined. A set of closed-minded questionnaire was developed on the basis of these factors to collect the data from employees & employers. Questionnaire was administered by using statistical tools such as matrix, cross tabulation & Paired Samples Tests as a data collection tool and analyses. Research finding shows that sustainability of corporation was associated with the performance of economic, social, and environment. Other factors like quantitative environmental reporting, standard method, voluntary environmental disclosure, legal requirement, size of the company, volume of environmental disclosure, material flow analysis & life cycle assessment were found that they worked as a complement to enhance the performance of economic, social, and environment to achieve sustainable development in Bangladeshi corporation.

The study seeks to evaluate the extent and quality of environmental reporting following a longitudinal analysis and covering a wide spectrum of industries in a single frame. The study also attempts to identify the set of most favored environmental reporting items by firms and items which are least disclosed. Furthermore, the study attempts to test whether certain corporate attributes such as firm size, age of the firm, leverage ratio, profitability, presence of independent directors in the board and gender diversity have any influencing power over environmental disclosure practices. The whole study has been carried out from legitimacy theory setting.

The study follows longitudinal analysis to identify the extent and quality of environmental disclosures. A self-constructed checklist of 12 environmental reporting items has been developed analyzing the annual report and content analysis method is followed to measure the extent and quality of environmental disclosures and identify environmental reporting items which are mostly disclosed and which are least disclosed. The study further uses panel data regression analysis to investigate whether certain corporate attributes have any impact on environmental disclosures using multiple linear regression. Total of 345 annual reports of listed financial and nonfinancial institutions have been observed in this study ranging from 2015 to 2019.

The key finding suggests that strict enforcement of Green Banking Rules 2011 fosters country’s commercial banks to invest more to protect the environment and commercial banks encourage nonfinancial institutions for environmental performance and related disclosures through finance. Therefore, almost 50% of sample firms disclose their environmental performance through reporting in either narrative, quantitative or monetary format which was only 2.23% in the last decade. Findings also reveal that tree plantation is the most reported environment disclosure followed by investment in renewable energy and green infrastructural projects and the least reported items are fund allocation for climatic changes and carbon management policy. Further analysis shows that firm size and leverage ratio both have positive impact on environmental reporting.

An in-depth analysis may be conducted to identify why certain environmental items are least disclosed such as fund allotment for climatic changes, carbon management policy, etc. and how corporations may earn social appreciation and motivation by investing in those least preferred items in legitimacy theory setting. Future research may also take into consideration other corporate attributes which are not considered in the study.

The study conducted an in-depth analysis to understand the most favored form of environmental disclosures (narrative/quantitative/monetary) and their extent after incorporation of regulatory guidelines, which is the first of its kind in the research of environmental disclosures. The study indeed contributes to the documentation of environmental reporting in the context of a developing country where there is a lack of longitudinal analysis from the lens of legitimacy theory. Moreover, a wide spectrum of industries has been taken into consideration which facilitates the generalized findings on the environmental disclosure practices of corporations in Bangladesh.

本研究擬評估公司報告環境方面的程度和質量, 以及對就環境報告披露而言、最受青睞和最不受歡迎的項目加以處理。研究亦擬測試企業屬性對實踐環境信息披露的影響。

研究使用內容分析法、去測量環境信息披露的程度和質量。研究使用多元回歸分析、去探討企業屬性對環境信息披露的影響。研究涵蓋孟加拉國上市公司共345個年度報告, 涵蓋的年期為2015年至 2019年。

研究結果似乎顯示綠色金融規則 - 2011 、成功鼓勵機構為保護環境而投放更多資源; 機構最樂於匯報的項目為植樹, 而披露最少的則為氣候變化和碳管理政策。進一步的研究分析顯示, 公司的規模和杠杆比率均會對環境匯報帶來正面的影響。

本研究豐富了關於發展中國家環境匯報的官方文件記錄, 而在這類國家, 透過合法化理論而進行的縱貫性分析研究頗為缺乏。本研究以深度分析法、去瞭解環境信息披露方面最受青睞的信息披露方式 (故事形式的敘述/定量形式/金融形式), 也去瞭解納入強制的規管指引後環境信息披露的程度; 就此而言, 本研究為這類環境信息披露研究的首個研究。

This study aims to examine whether and how gender diversity on corporate boards is associated with voluntary nonfinancial disclosures, particularly water disclosures.

This study uses corporate water information disclosure data from Chinese listed firms between 2010 and 2018 to conduct regression analyses to examine the association between female directors and water information disclosure.

Empirical results show that female directors have a significantly positive association with corporate water information disclosure. Additionally, internal industry water sensitivity of firms moderates this significant relationship.

This study determined that female directors can promote not only water disclosure but also positive corporate water performance, reflecting the consistency of words and deeds of female directors in voluntary nonfinancial disclosures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why environmentally-sensitive companies still face criticism despite the extensive disclosures in their annual reports. This paper explores the extent of site-specific social, environmental and ethical (SEE) reporting by mining companies operating in Ghana.

The authors conduct an interpretive content analysis of the annual/integrated reports of mining companies for the years 2009–2014 to extract site-specific SEE information relating to the companies’ mining operations in Ghana. The authors also theorise these actions using the existentialist work of Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular his work on “bad faith, nothingness and authenticity”.

The findings suggest that SEE information disclosure at site-specific level remains problematic because of bad faith and inauthenticity by mining companies attempting to placate a range of stakeholders. Bad faith represents a form of self-deception or internal denial which manifests in corporate narratives. Inauthenticity is a self-awareness that culminates in the denunciation of corporate identity and the pursuit of external expectations. The effect is the production of inauthentic corporate accounts that is constrained by the assumption made on stakeholder expectation.

The authors apply a Sartrean lens to explore site-specific SEE. Furthermore, the authors seek to expand the social accounting research domain by drawing on Sartre’s work on “bad faith” and “nothingness”. Sartre’s work to the best of the authors’ knowledge is not explored in social accounting research.