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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.

This paper aims to provide evidence to suggest that private social and environmental reporting (i.e. one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and investees on social and environmental issues) is beginning to merge with private financial reporting and that, as a result, integrated private reporting is emerging.

In this paper, 19 FTSE100 companies and 20 UK institutional investors were interviewed to discover trends in private integrated reporting and to gauge whether private reporting is genuinely becoming integrated. The emergence of integrated private reporting through the lens of institutional logics was interpreted. The emergence of integrated private reporting as a merging of two hitherto separate and possibly rival institutional logics was framed.

It was found that specialist socially responsible investment managers are starting to attend private financial reporting meetings, while mainstream fund managers are starting to attend private meetings on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Further, senior company directors are becoming increasingly conversant with ESG issues.

The findings were interpreted as two possible scenarios: there is a genuine hybridisation occurring in the UK institutional investment such that integrated private reporting is emerging or the financial logic is absorbing and effectively neutralising the responsible investment logic.

These findings provide evidence of emergent integrated private reporting which are useful to both the corporate and institutional investment communities as they plan their engagement meetings.

No study has hitherto examined private social and environmental reporting through interview research from the perspective of emergent integrated private reporting. This is the first paper to discuss integrated reporting in the private reporting context.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the factors determining the social and environmental reporting (SER) of Indian textile and apparel (TA) firms.

The 2010 annual reports of a sample of top 100 Indian TA firms listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange were examined to assess the extent of SER. SER was assessed based on the Global Reporting Initiative index applicable to the TA industry. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to investigate the determinants of SER.

This study reports a low extent of SER in the annual reports of Indian listed TA firms, with a mean disclosure of 14 per cent. On average, firms reported more extensive environmental information, with a mean disclosure of 18.4 per cent, compared to social information, with a mean disclosure of 10.7 per cent. Most firms reported social information relating to “labour practices and decent work”, while the reporting of information relating to “human rights” was sparse. Overall, the SER patterns provide support for legitimacy theory. Consistent with legitimacy theory expectations, corporate size, brand development and audit committee size are significant factors determining the variation in SER. No significant relationship was found between board independence, level of ownership and SER.

There is no existing study specifically on SER by TA firms in India. In fact, there is surprisingly little research on SER in the Indian context in general. Given the dearth in research on corporate social reporting in the Indian context, the study extends prior literature on corporate SER by concentrating on SER of TA firms in an emerging economy. The theoretical contribution of this study is the testing of legitimacy theory in the context of an emerging economy. This study contributes towards practice by delineating the relationship between governance structure and SER, particularly with regard to issues such as child labour. These findings have implications for the future development of reporting standards and regulations in regard to corporate governance in India. The dearth of social reporting by Indian TA firms has implications for foreign purchasers of branded products, as international companies have been implicated in sub-optimal social or environmental practices or incidents.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of social and environmental reporting (SER) evolution, i.e. how and why the SER evolved over time in a cooperative bank in Italy.

The paper is based on a qualitative fieldwork case study conducted from 2011 to 2015. Information and data were collected through several methods including: interviews with managers involved in the SER’s process; analysis of the SER-related documents; analysis of the website; and observations in the field. The analysis of the empirical evidence draws on the institutional logic (IL) perspective, which provides theoretical insights to interpret the role of the contrasting institutional forces in the evolution of SER.

The empirical analysis unveils three different stages in the evolution of SER: the “birth” whereby a new form of social reporting was initiated; the “development” through which SER was implemented to become a formal component of the organizational management; and the “de-structuring” when the SER was gradually de-composed. This gradual de-structuring, as well as the initiation and implementation processes, was influenced by different institutionally infused rationalities and logics. These institutionally infused rationalities and logics, along with the specific organizational and contextual events, provided the resources, and created the space and opportunity, for the SER-related changes to occur.

The analysis offers theoretical insights to understand “how” (i.e. processes) and “why” (i.e. the conditions under which) SER gradually evolved, i.e. emerged, was constructed and developed during the phases of implementation and post-implementation. Furthermore, it is shown that SER is multifunctional in nature and unveils how and why these multiple functions change over time. Finally, the analysis provides a theoretical contribution by illuminating the role that different and contrasting ILs play in driving the adoption of organizational practices.

An important outcome of the UK Company Law Review (CLR) involved draft regulations for a mandatory operating and financial review (OFR). The unprecedented abandonment of this mandatory OFR in November 2005 threw debate about the genuine motivations underlying the CLR into disarray. This paper seeks to reinterpret the abandonment of a mandatory OFR using interview research.

The authors conducted a series of 24 interviews with companies from the FTSE100 between May and August 2004, prior to the abandonment.

The interviews showed that the OFR was perceived as an appropriate vehicle for social and environmental reporting (SER). The interviewees considered that a mandatory OFR would provide a means of forcing SER into the mainstream and making it mandatory at a basic level. The interviews revealed that processes for the identification of material SER differ widely between organisations, ranging from embryonic to highly structured. Further, interviewees believed that directors had the final veto on inclusion of information. Despite directors' inclination to hide behind materiality as a means of avoiding SER, interviewees did not view the proposed mandatory OFR as “greenwash” but as a vehicle that would increase stakeholder confidence, as processes underlying the proposed OFR would be audited.

The research implies that abandoning the mandatory OFR represented a lost opportunity for SER.

The paper provides new evidence on the processes of materiality decision making in the SER area as well as strong endorsement of the mandatory OFR, contrary to the government turn‐around.

Mobilizing a theoretical framework combining institutional logics and “imprinting” lenses, this paper provides an in-depth contextualized analysis of how historical imprints affect social and environmental reporting (SER) practices in Romania, a post-communist country in Eastern Europe.

The authors conduct a qualitative field study with a diverse dataset including regulations, publicly available reports and interviews with multiple actors involved in the SER field in Romania. The authors follow a reflexive approach in constructing the narratives by mobilizing their personal experience and understanding of the field to analyze the rich empirical material.

The authors identify a blend of logics that combine local and Western conceptualizations of business responsibilities and explain how the transition from a communist ideology to the free market economy affected SER practices in Romania. The authors also highlight four major imprints and document their longitudinal development, evidencing three main patterns: persistence, transformation and decay. The authors find that the deep connections that form between logics and imprints explain the cohabitation of logics rather than their straight replacement.

The paper contributes by evidencing the role of imprints' dynamics in the institutionalization of SER logics. The authors claim that the persistence (decay) of imprints from a former regime such as communism hinders (facilitates) the institutionalization of Western SER logics. Transformation instead has more uncertain effects. The pattern that an imprint takes hinges upon its usefulness for business interests.

This paper aims to determine the perceptions of managers in China with respect to the pressures for, and the purposes of, social and environmental reporting (SER) in the Chinese context.

The authors interviewed 14 managers from nine different state-owned enterprises, all headquartered in Beijing. Interviews were conducted during 2009, the height of the period of growth in standalone corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in China. The authors assess the perceptions of the managers from a neo-institutional perspective.

The findings indicate that, similar to reporting in more Western economies, managers perceive that a variety of coercive, normative and mimetic pressures interplay to influence SER in the Chinese context. The managers perceive peer institutions as exerting the greatest pressures for reporting and, surprisingly, indicate that the government, rather than exerting coercive pressures for SER, instead is seen as playing a facilitating role. The findings also reveal that the managers almost uniformly see the purpose of the reporting as a tool of image enhancement, particularly with respect to the general public. However, in contrast to studies of organizational response to institutional change in other settings, the authors find little non-conformity.

The findings suggest neo-institutional arguments for CSR reporting appear to hold, even in China’s socialist market economy.

The finding that managers see CSR reporting as being largely about image enhancement may help to explain the low quality of disclosure documented in other studies.

Improving CSR disclosure in China would appear to require more mandated pressure from, particularly, governmental powers.

This is the first study to explore via in-depth interviews the perceptions of managers in China to the evolving practice of standalone CSR reporting.

Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to control activities on its territory, due to the rising need to find solutions for universal problems, like the pollution of the environment, on an international level. Globalisation is a complex, forceful legal and social process that take place within an integrated whole with out regard to geographical boundaries. Globalisation thus differs from international activities, which arise between and among States, and it differs from multinational activities that occur in more than one nation‐State. This does not mean that countries are not involved in the sociolegal dynamics that those transboundary process trigger. In a sense, the movements triggered by global processes promote greater economic interdependence among countries. Globalisation can be traced back to the depression preceding World War II and globalisation at that time included spreading of the capitalist economic system as a means of getting access to extended markets. The first step was to create sufficient export surplus to maintain full employment in the capitalist world and secondly establishing a globalized economy where the planet would be united in peace and wealth. The idea of interdependence among quite separate and distinct countries is a very important part of talks on globalisation and a significant side of today’s global political economy.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Identification and characterization of organic pigments and dyes used in works of art and cultural heritage material such as prints, drawings, manuscripts, paintings, and textiles can provide important information for dating, authentication, and conservation treatment of these objects and studying art history in general. Applications of surface‐enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for this purpose have recently attracted increasing attention of both academic scientists and museum researchers. This paper aims to review the latest development involving the emerging applications of SERS for the analysis of organic pigments and dyes used in works of art and cultural heritage material.

First, the importance of organic pigments and dyes in the studies of works of art and cultural heritage material and the challenges in their identification and characterization are briefly summarized. This is followed by a discussion on sampling considerations in the context of art and archaeology. Then the fundamental principle of SERS, SERS instrumentation and different types of SERS substrates are reviewed. Finally, selected examples of SERS applications to the identification of organic pigments and dyes, including the analysis of a couple of samples of artistic and archaeological interest, are presented and discussed.

The last few years have witnessed the emergence of SERS as a non‐destructive or micro‐destructive technique for the characterization of organic pigments and dyes found in artistic and archaeological objects. Spectroscopic and microscopic measurements using SERS have provided some novel information and answers to a wide variety of questions. However, SERS application to the field of art and archaeology is still in the fledging stage of development and requires closer collaboration between academic scientists and museum researchers. But the range of possible applications is broad. Future trends point to a strong need for the development of portable instruments for field applications.

By compiling this review, the authors hope to direct more attention toward SERS and bring together the expertise in the scientific, museum and art community to further explore the possibilities of SERS in rapid and direct identification of pigments and dyes under field conditions.