Corporate social responsibility - attitudes, performance and reporting: a comparative study of an emerging and developed economy

The thesis (1) examines managerial attitudes towards social and environmental (S&E) accountability, (2) measures organisational S&E performance and (3) examines the extent of S&E disclosure. The purpose of the study is to compare, across Australia and India, the attitudes of managers toward S&E issues, S&E performance and determinants of S&E disclosure. This study argues for greater engagement by S&E accounting researchers with S&E practice, particularly within emerging economies. The study also illustrated that gaps and challenges still remain in improving the performance and extent of S&E disclosure from an emerging and developed economy perspective. This study is important in gaining an understanding of current and potentially future Indian managerial attitudes toward S&E accountability, performance and reporting. Given India's ongoing economic growth and development, it is critical that managers both understand the importance of CSR and enact policies and practices to reduce their organisations overall negative social and environmental impact. Economic growth is placing significant pressure on India's social infrastructure and environmental resources. As India continues to develop and interact in the global market, it is essential to understand Indian managerial attitudes on CSR, the CSR practices they put into place, and the extent of CSR information that they formally report, in order to gauge the extent to which social and environmental problems can be identified and reduced, and overall improvements made. Using a questionnaire survey the first paper seeks to explore whether respondents from Australia and India, characterised by differing levels of social and economic development, vary in their attitudes towards social and environmental accountability. Findings indicate that Australian respondents are concerned about specific issues within the broad social accountability continuum, whilst Indian respondents are concerned about a range of issues surrounding social accountability. Indian respondents were stronger in their support of certain questions related to environmental attitudes than Australian respondents. Significant differences existed between the 318 respondents on 16 of the 34 questions. The second paper uses four management and two operational performance indicators to measure selected components of environmental performance across various industries. Results imply that corporate efforts in environmental management may not necessarily lead to good operational performance. Indian managers consider that corporate environmental performance (CEP1) is more dependent upon environmental management performance (EMP2) than environmental operational performance (EOP3). Australian managers consider both to be equally important in determining CEP. Using 35 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) based social and environmental indicators, the third paper evaluates extent of reporting across five industries presented in annual reports and indicates that S&E reporting by Indian organisations is lower than Australian organisations. The extent of total disclosure is significantly higher for large organisations in the Forestry and Paper, Industrial Engineering, Industrial Transport and Mining industries. Australian organisations with negative returns on total assets reported significantly higher social information than Indian organisations. The extent of reporting is unrelated to organisational age, external auditor size, and degree of multinational influence for both countries