Politicizing the expertise of the accounting industry in the realm of corporate social responsibility

The accounting industry plays an important role in the production and implementation of accountability mechanisms surrounding corporate social responsibility practices. Operating as both politicians and implementers of knowledge (Gendron, Cooper, & Townley, 2007), the expert activities of accountants are never purely technical. This paper focuses on the mediating role of accounting firms and professional bodies in aligning the socially responsible practices of organizations with the rational morality of the market. I show that the construction of the market as a moral marker of socially responsible action is the result of a major effort of rationalization aimed at justifying the emergence of a social and moral conscience in business, not in the name of subjective feelings or human values, but in the name of an economic and depoliticized logic of profitability. Drawing on the political analysis of Latour (2004) [Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy] and his metaphor of the ‘modern constitution’, I view the economicization of corporate social responsibility as symptomatic of the power imbalance between the world of humans and the world of objects governing the political structure of contemporary society and weakening democratic activity.     

The accountant will have a central role in saving the planet … really? A reflection on ‘green accounting and green eyeshades twenty years later’

There is widespread but not universal acceptance that organisations should provide ‘accounts’ of not only their financial performance, but also of their social and environmental performance. There have also been various suggestions across time that traditional financial reporting frameworks, albeit with some modification, have relevance to calls for greater corporate accountability. This paper seeks to dismiss such suggestions. For the accounting profession to be able to meaningfully contribute to extending accountability beyond investors, lenders, and creditors (and it undoubtedly serves these interests well) it will need to abandon many core accounting conventions and principles – something that is deemed unlikely to occur – at least in the readers’ lifetime. This paper also highlights the apparent absurdity of using market-based mechanisms (such as cap-and-trade systems for pollutants) to solve social and environmental problems that were effectively caused by ‘the market’. Having questioned the role of the accounting profession in contributing to broad-based corporate accountability, the paper concludes by questioning the role of accounting and business educators in instilling some form of personal social responsibility in the minds of students.     

企业精准扶贫行为影响企业风险吗？

精准扶贫是一项国家战略,企业精准扶贫是打赢脱贫攻坚战的重要环节。本文以2016-2018年A股市场参与精准扶贫的非金融类上市公司为样本,研究精准扶贫参与水平对企业风险的影响。研究发现:(1)企业精准扶贫的参与水平越高,其股票市场风险越低;(2)企业信息透明度越低,参与精准扶贫对企业风险的降低作用越强;(3)制度环境越薄弱的地区,参与精准扶贫对企业风险的降低程度越大;(4)进一步分析发现,企业精准扶贫提高了企业声誉、资源获取能力和生产效率,降低了信息不对称,从而有助于降低企业风险。本文研究了企业精准扶贫对企业风险的影响及作用机理,经验证据表明,上市公司积极参与精准扶贫既响应国家号召,为打赢脱贫攻坚战贡献力量,又有利于降低企业风险,能够获得承担社会责任与规避风险的“双赢”结果。     

企业社会责任:“真心”抑或“幌子”?——基于高管内幕交易视角的研究

企业承担社会责任究竟是“真心”还是“幌子”?与现有研究聚焦于考察社会责任对企业行为的影响不同,本文基于高管个体行为视角,实证检验企业社会责任对高管个体证券交易行为的影响。基于2008～2014年中国沪深A股上市公司高管10338个内幕交易样本的实证结果显示:(1)企业承担社会责任不仅能抑制高管内幕交易的规模,更能显著降低高管内幕交易获利性,这表明作为社会责任的谋划者,企业高管并未以社会责任为“幌子”牟取个人证券交易的私利,在一定程度上提供了企业“真心”承担社会责任的证据;(2)进一步从“信息模型”和“声誉模型”双重视角探究发现,在企业信息不透明和高管个人声誉较差的情况下,企业社会责任对高管内幕交易获利性的抑制作用更为显著;并且相较于高管个人声誉较差的情况,企业社会责任在信息不透明的情况下对高管内幕交易获利性的抑制作用更强。总之,本研究从高管个体行为视角提供了企业社会责任具有积极治理作用的证据,不仅丰富了企业承担社会责任经济后果的研究,同时,对利益相关者也具有实践指导意义。     

Strategy and society: the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility

Governments, activists, and the media have become adept at holding companies to account for the social consequences of their actions. In response, corporate social responsibility has emerged as an inescapable priority for business leaders in every country. Frequently, though, CSR efforts are counterproductive, for two reasons. First, they pit business against society, when in reality the two are interdependent. Second, they pressure companies to think of corporate social responsibility in generic ways instead of in the way most appropriate to their individual strategies. The fact is, the prevailing approaches to CSR are so disconnected from strategy as to obscure many great opportunities for companies to benefit society. What a terrible waste. If corporations were to analyze their opportunities for social responsibility using the same frameworks that guide their core business choices, they would discover, as Whole Foods Market, Toyota, and Volvo have done, that CSR can be much more than a cost, a constraint, or a charitable deed--it can be a potent source of innovation and competitive advantage. In this article, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer propose a fundamentally new way to look at the relationship between business and society that does not treat corporate growth and social welfare as a zero-sum game. They introduce a framework that individual companies can use to identify the social consequences of their actions; to discover opportunities to benefit society and themselves by strengthening the competitive context in which they operate; to determine which CSR initiatives they should address; and to find the most effective ways of doing so. Perceiving social responsibility as an opportunity rather than as damage control or a PR campaign requires dramatically different thinking--a mind-set, the authors warn, that will become increasingly important to competitive success.     

Corporate social reporting and stakeholder accountability: The missing link

Recent years have witnessed a significant degree of administrative reform, in terms of the increasing number of major companies proclaiming their social responsibility credentials, and backing up their claims by producing substantial environmental, social and sustainability reports. The paper critically evaluates the degree of institutional reform, designed to empower stakeholders, and thereby enhance corporate accountability, accompanying these voluntary initiatives, together with that potentially ensuing from proposed regulations, later rescinded, for mandatory publication of an Operating and Financial Review by UK quoted companies. It is concluded that both forms of disclosure offer little in the way of opportunity for facilitating action on the part of organizational stakeholders, and cannot therefore be viewed as exercises in accountability.     

Political Views and Corporate Decision Making: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and political beliefs in the United States. By analyzing the 2004 presidential election results of communities in which corporate headquarters are located, we establish a correlation between the political beliefs of corporate stakeholders and the CSR ratings of their firms. Companies with a high CSR rating tend to be located in Democratic, or “blue” states and counties, while companies with a low CSR rating tend to be located in Republican, or “red” states and counties.     

企业社会责任:“真心”抑或“幌子”?——基于高管内幕交易视角的研究

企业承担社会责任究竟是“真心”还是“幌子”?与现有研究聚焦于考察社会责任对企业行为的影响不同,本文基于高管个体行为视角,实证检验企业社会责任对高管个体证券交易行为的影响。基于2008～2014年中国沪深A股上市公司高管10338个内幕交易样本的实证结果显示:(1)企业承担社会责任不仅能抑制高管内幕交易的规模,更能显著降低高管内幕交易获利性,这表明作为社会责任的谋划者,企业高管并未以社会责任为“幌子”牟取个人证券交易的私利,在一定程度上提供了企业“真心”承担社会责任的证据;(2)进一步从“信息模型”和“声誉模型”双重视角探究发现,在企业信息不透明和高管个人声誉较差的情况下,企业社会责任对高管内幕交易获利性的抑制作用更为显著;并且相较于高管个人声誉较差的情况,企业社会责任在信息不透明的情况下对高管内幕交易获利性的抑制作用更强。总之,本研究从高管个体行为视角提供了企业社会责任具有积极治理作用的证据,不仅丰富了企业承担社会责任经济后果的研究,同时,对利益相关者也具有实践指导意义。     

Managing the “S” in ESG: The Case of Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries

Although a company's “social license to operate” is critical to its long‐run viability and success, the “social” component of corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) problems appears to be taking the longest to be integrated into the corporate business model. The authors make the case that corporate boards must assume a more direct and proactive role in identifying, measuring, and mitigating social risk. Board involvement in the management of social issues, although not a silver bullet by itself, is an important step that can help catalyze the changes needed within upper, middle, and lower management. The absence of board oversight of social performance means that the reporting chain is not reaching the highest level of management. And this in turn creates a lack of attention and accountability to social performance that is likely to permeate the rest of the company. Along with board oversight, companies need more and better information to understand the value that good social performance creates for business, and to equip them for building and maintaining positive relationships with communities. At the individual company level, this means more comprehensive and granular analysis of social risk, the full range of costs of conflicts with local communities, the benefits of having a social license, and quality baseline data for community engagement. At the macro level, these data points must be aggregated to understand their implications across industries.     

企业社会责任、融资约束与企业金融化

企业承担社会责任能够通过与利益相关者进行资源交换获得战略资源,但是战略资源对企业绩效的影响取决于企业的投资方向。在实体企业金融化愈演愈烈的经济环境下,本文利用2010—2017年中国A股非金融上市公司数据重点探讨了企业社会责任对企业金融化的影响及其作用机制。研究结果表明:(1)企业社会责任提高了企业的金融资产配置水平,存在“金融化效应”;(2)融资约束在企业社会责任对企业金融化的影响中具有部分中介作用,企业社会责任通过缓解融资约束加剧了企业金融化;(3)企业社会责任的“金融化效应”仅在外部监管力度较弱的非国有企业、内部治理水平较低的低股权集中度企业中存在,行政外部监督和企业内部监督能够在“融资约束—企业金融化”过程中对管理层的机会主义行为发挥治理作用;(4)识别机制检验证实了中国企业金融化主要出于利润最大化的“投资替代”动机。以上结论为政策制定者规范企业社会责任报告披露方式、引导金融回归实体经济具有借鉴意义。     

Smoke and mirrors: Corporate social responsibility and tax avoidance

The bourgeoning corporate social responsibility literature has paid little attention to organised tax avoidance by companies even though it has real consequences for the life chances of millions of people. Companies legitimise their social credentials by making promises of responsible and ethical conduct, but organisational culture and practices have not necessarily been aligned with publicly espoused claims. This paper draws attention to the gaps between corporate talk, decisions and action, or what may be characterised as organised hypocrisy. Its persistence can become a liability and threaten the welfare of the company, its employees and its executives. The paper provides examples to show how companies, including major accountancy firms, make promises of responsible conduct, but indulge in tax avoidance and evasion. It also shows that the exposure of contradictions between talk and action has yielded negative outcomes.     

Corporate ethical futures: responsibility for the shadow on the future of today's ethical corporations

Humankind needs protection from the actions of corporations, which have an effect in time and space beyond the boundaries that they attend to in their day-to-day business decisions or their regulatory duties. A combination of an ethical orientation with a futures orientation gives rise to ethical futures, which produces a more developed and robust moral code for corporate organisations. In a pilot study of the current corporate social responsibility reports of five corporate organisations, a tentative qualitative relationship was found between the futures orientation of these corporations and their (BITC) corporate social responsibility index rating. Enforcing corporate ethical futures should become an imperative for stakeholders.     

构建新时代企业社会责任体系的思考

新时代对加强企业社会责任体系建设提出了新的要求,要重视企业社会责任体系建设,提高思想认识,着重弄清企业社会责任的具体内容,企业社会责任体系的构建,企业社会责任体系建设的途径,承担起社会赋予的责任和使命,把十九大精神落到实处。     

Future roles of business in society: the expanding boundaries of corporate responsibility and a compelling case for partnership

The roles and responsibilities of business in society, in particular global business, are being defined more broadly by an expanding range of stakeholders. This paper aims to review these changes and their implications in order to understand better the likely future expectations of business in society and the way in which leading companies are setting new standards of responsible business practice. It begins by tracing trends within corporate social responsibility debates, and then draws on empirical research and observed stakeholder demands of business, to argue that the boundaries of corporate responsibility are advancing both internally and externally.Internally, these boundaries are changing in terms of the increased responsibility of corporations towards their direct and indirect internal stakeholders. This is shown through innovations in business practice to achieve enhanced social justice in the workplace, improved governance, and more accurate disclosure of non-financial risk. This paper provides a context for this discussion by examining emerging international law, guidelines and voluntary initiatives, regulatory frameworks, and risk review procedures that increasingly seek to redefine corporate responsibility by establishing new norms of best practice and behaviour. These boundaries are also expanding externally, as society increasingly expects global business to work with others to provide solutions to humanitarian crises and endemic problems facing the world. This paper explores how some companies are doing this by applying core competencies in ways that integrate social development and business goals. It suggests, in turn, that the challenges of these expanding boundaries of responsibilities are best addressed through strategic partnerships.This paper concludes that there are new multi-stakeholder convened global governance frameworks evolving that are encouraging businesses of the future to re-invent themselves as a ‘force for positive good’ in society. This involves going beyond the paradigm of simply ‘doing no harm’, and way beyond previous expectations of business as being only about shareholder value. This prediction is supported by examples drawn from the practice of global companies that are already innovating to fulfil this wider role.     

Corporate greed: its effect on customer satisfaction,corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation among bank customers

Corporate greed has received increasing attention in recent years with various stories hitting the headlines, particularly after the global financial crisis and the ensuing negative attitudes toward banks. Customer satisfaction and corporate social responsibility are known to have a positive effect on corporate reputation among customers, but perceived corporate greed is likely to impede their effect. Corporate greed, customer satisfaction, corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation are considered, and a research model is proposed. Results indicate that the effect of corporate greed is stronger on corporate social responsibility than on customer satisfaction, implying that corporate social responsibility activities may be futile if the company is perceived to be acting greedily by its customers. Thus, perceptions of corporate greed need to be dealt with swiftly, to enable management to enhance the corporate reputation of the firm.     

Hadfields Ltd: its annual general meetings 1903–1939 and their relevance for contemporary corporate social reporting

Little attention has been given to studies of the historical antecedents of corporate social reporting (CSR). The paper looks at the disclosures made by Hadfields Ltd and other British companies at the beginning of the 20th century, and finds that these included topics such as economic, political and industrial relations conditions, in a style analogous to that employed in CSR reporting today, during periods of difficulty and conflict for the reporting companies. The paper concludes that these findings support the argument that CSR may be less a reflection of a new relationship between companies and society than another form of what Milne calls ‘advocacy advertising’.     

The business case for regulation of corporate social responsibility and accountability

This paper develops an alternative (or supplementary) theoretical justification for the regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR) to the justification contained in the extant academic literature. It does this by demonstrating how, contrary to the dominant business discourse, increased regulation designed to protect the social and environmental interests of a range of stakeholders can also serve to enhance corporate economic performance and shareholder value.

The theoretical perspectives developed in this paper are drawn from Beck's and Giddens’ theories on reflexive modernity, and indicate that reflexively appropriated knowledge can be a key factor in developing socially constructed understandings of the social and environmental risks to a range of stakeholders inherent in business operations.

In situations where voluntary self-regulation of CSR and SEAR has been ineffective in preventing corporate actions and decisions that have resulted in damaging social and environmental consequences, processes of reflexivity can substantially increase public awareness of the level of risk they face from corporate operations. Such increased perceptions of risk can lead to a loss of trust in an individual corporation or a whole industrial sector, and this can be exacerbated where stakeholders begin to actively seek out alternative risk discourses to inform themselves about possible risks of which they were previously unaware. We argue that effective statutory regulation could avoid these outcomes, and the loss of shareholder economic value that can flow from these outcomes.     

Determinants of corporate social responsibility disclosures: Evidence from India

Over the last few decades, a number of studies, mostly in the western countries, have investigated the nature and frequency of corporate social responsibility disclosures, their patterns and trends, and their general relationships with corporate size and profitability. This study seeks to extend the knowledge regarding the relationship between a number of financial and non-financial corporate characteristics and the level of social responsibility disclosures based on an extensive sample of top Indian companies. Corporate size and industry category are found to correlate with the corporate social disclosures of the companies and the corporate reputation as recognised through awards and social ratings has also been observed to be a significant factor that influences the social disclosures made by the Indian companies.     

Understandings of accountability: an autoethnographic account using metaphor

The practical engagement of developing social accounts has provided me with an opportunity to consider different understandings of accountability. My reflective personal account, an autoethnography, explores difference in approaches to and insights into accountability in practice. The changed understandings of accountability developed during and after the production of two sets of social accounts with a not-for-profit organization. As part of the sense making process within the personal account, generative metaphor is used to enable reflection on the problem of accountability within social accounts. In this case the problem is both acknowledging and recognising the effect of my approach to and understandings of accountability during the production and reporting of two social accounts. The first social account was developed with a more formal and instrumental approach to accountability than the second which drew upon the initial experience and understanding of the first included a broader and more complex view of accountability. The recognition of a changed appreciation of accountability through the experience provides a deeper view of how accountability can be played out in practice with a not-for-profit community based organization. The result is my acknowledgement of a broader more encompassing notion of the complexity of accountability as part of a fragmented and changing world (Miller, 2002). By acknowledging this complexity I have opened a space that enables me to recognise the influence of my approach to accountability in practice. There is a need to recognise how we approach accountability in order to counter the current dominance of calculative forms of accountability from the ‘business case’ perspective supporting control of powerful elites that steer society. An accountability that includes complexity and the non-calculative is a more appropriate form for a not-for-profit organization rather than a dominant calculative accountability.