A Social Critique of Corporate Reporting

In the critically acclaimed first edition of A Social Critique of Corporate Reporting, David Crowther examined the perceived dialectic around traditional and environmental reporting to show it to be a false dialectic. Corporate reporting continues to change rapidly to incorporate more detail and especially environmental and social information. At the same time the mechanism for reporting has changed and the internet now enables more information to be provided to an ever wider range of stakeholders and interest groups. The perceived conflict between financial performance representing the needs of investors and other dimensions of performance representing the needs of other stakeholders still however continues to exist. In this updated edition, this perceived conflict is re-examined along with the wider purposes of corporate reporting. These are examined in the context of web based reporting and a greater concern for all stakeholders. The conclusion is that, although recent developments have produced changes, the essential conflict is still professed to exist, but remains a largely imaginary one. The analysis in this book makes use of both statistics and semiotics and in so doing develops a semiology of corporate reporting that offers an alternative to other research that is largely based on econometrics. Researchers, higher level students and others with an interest in or responsibility for corporate reporting, corporate social responsibility, accounting research, or semiotics will find this book essential reading.

Autorentext

David Crowther is Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility and Head of the Centre for Research into Organisational Governance at De Montfort University, UK. He is also Chair of the Social Responsibility Research Network (www.socialresponsibility.biz), a worldwide network with over 600 members, organizer of the series of International Conferences on Corporate Social Responsibility (now in its 12th year) and editor of Social Responsibility Journal. He has published over 40 books and has contributed over 350 articles to academic, business and professional journals and to edited book collections. He has also spoken widely at conferences and seminars and acted as a consultant to a wide range of government, professional and commercial organisations. Professor Crowther's research is into corporate social responsibility with a particular emphasis on the relationship between social, environmental and financial performance.

Inhalt

Contents: Preface to the second edition; The function of corporate reporting; Measuring and reporting performance; Accounting for social and environmental performance; Semiology and statistics: a methodology for analysis; The performance discourse: measurement and evaluation; The environmental discourse: the qualitative evidence; Considering performance: interpretation of the evidence; The future focus of reporting: evidence from semiotic analysis; The semiology of external reporting: an evaluation of the evidence; The future of corporate reporting; Bibliography; Index.