上市公司年报中社会责任信息披露的影响因素——基于合法性视角的研究

Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure(CSRD) in Annual Reports of Listed Companies:——From Legitimacy Theory Perspective

本文以合法性理论为基础,分析了中国上市公司年报社会责任信息的内容特征,以及影响企业社会责任信息披露指数的合法性因素。结果表明,随着公司规模的扩大以及媒体曝光度的提高,企业社会责任信息披露指数显著增长。与现有研究结论不同,本文认为公司社会责任信息披露指数与公司上市年龄存在显著的负相关关系,这一结论与中国特殊的资本市场发展模式密切相关。本文的贡献在于提供了合法性理论在中国新兴市场中有效的经验证据,对于公司管理层以及监管部门具有启示意义。

Since Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission and the Original Economic and Trade Regulatory Commission promulgated the Corporate Governance Code of Listed Companies in 2002, corporate social responsibility （CSR） and CSR information disclosure has attracted an increase attention both in practice and academy. While the existing literature focuses on the disclosure of corporate social information mainly from the stakeholders＇perspective, this paper concentrates on the influence of legitimacy purpose which is dominant in explaining corporation＇s incentive of presenting corporate social responsibility information. According to legitimacy theory, company＇s presenting corporate social information is a response to social continuous pressure and media pressure on a significant social event. Corporate social information disclosure provides company a method to communicate with the society. On one hand, corporate social information disclosure is a conduct of building up legitimacy signal. Because corporate social information can influence the perception of corporate reputation of the outside users by improving its own social and environmental conduct, corporation can achieve a corporate citizenshipreputation and, then set up a legitimacy signal. On the other hand, corporate social information is also a method of defending legitimacy. Corporation can demonstrate its existence through disclosing corporate social responsibility information to society. In a whole, companies＇purpose to disclose CSR information is to demon- strate that they are operating within the framework of social norm and ethics to legitimize their conducts. Based on 2008 -2009 annual reports published by Chinese A-share companies listed in Shanghai Stock Exchange, we construct a set of CSRD index to evaluate the quality of corporate social inforuaation of listed companies to investigate the extent and theme focus of corporate social responsibility of Chinese listed companies. And then, we execute a series of regression test to explore the factors that influence the variation of CSR disclosure based on legitimacy theory. Results indicate that the main foci of social information from Chinese listed companies are shareholder responsibility themes, followed by training and education in employee and natural resource conservation is the last. Corporate social responsibility disclosure is still very low with a median of 0. 1 in two sample years. The information of responsibility to shareholders, employee and other interested parties increases in these two years, while the other three kinds of information decrease. In terms of the environment responsibility, energy saving and emission reduction is more reported than the other items both in environment sensitive companies and environment non - sensitive companies. The comparison between the environment sensitive companies and environment non - sensitive companies suggests that the former disclose more environment responsibility information then the latter. Similarly, consumer sensitive companies report more consumer ＆ community （CC） information than the non - sensitive com- panies except for the product quality item. With regard to the factors of influencing the quality of CSRD, multi - regression analysis results show that with the increase of company size and media exposure, the CSRD level also increase positively. However, contrary to prior studies, there is a negative relationship between corporate social responsibility disclosure and firm age due to the particularity of Chinese capital market. It is interesting that companies in environment - sensitive industries provide more environmental information, but not associated with a higher CSRD index, because these companies provide less consumer and community information. Industry variable related to consumer is not associated with the quality of corporate social responsibility in all regression models. The findings provide evidence on the effectiveness of legitimacy theory in Chinese emerging market. It suggests that annual report can be used as a strategic tool to legitimize the company＇s corporate social conducts and a complementary practice to develop corporate social responsibility market.