Globalization has spurred the growth and prominence of Corporate Social Responsibility, especially in the areas of non-employment of child labour, human rights, environmental pollution, social-marketing and social activities. The changing global environment has forced the corporations now to change the way of dissemination of information regarding their operations on corporate social responsibility and corporate sustainability issues. Corporate sustainability reporting is getting very popular in these days but still in India it is just at nascent stage. But research proves that its importance is growing year after year. As far as Indian scenario is concerned there is only limited number of companies which are showing their sustainability plans and performance to the various stakeholders. Indian corporations are following Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines to prepare the sustainability reports. These days companies are presenting their sustainability performance to the various users with the help of websites and also through published reports. I want to know the practices of CSR Reporting in Annual Accounts.
I would look for a company that, at least, can demonstrate sufficient understanding of the issues that it can (a) define sustainability and (b) measure it. I doubt very much if any of them can.
Thanks Dear Sir for your valuable comments.But I think there are a few companies which have started doing something in this context.
Indian companies has started their CSR activities and putting some money specially for it. Mostly they are making different set of organisation such as society and trust for the implementation of Social Interventions.
Hi
Int. Integrated Reporting Council, Global Reporting Initiative, and SASB are the most prominent authorities on the subject. Hope you find my studies on the subject useful.
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Hi Sanjeev,
I have a book coming out exactly on the topic of how companies are required to report on CSR and how they are reporting in their mandatory disclosure documents under the title: "Mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in the EU - Comprehensive Analysis of Various Corporate Reporting Instruments’ Current Capacity and Future Potential to Convey Non-Financial Information". The publisher is Eleven Publishing and the book should be out in a month or two, so keep an eye out.
From your question I'm not certain if you are interested in annual reports (so all types of annual mandatory reports of companies), the annual accounts (the annual financial statement and the notes to the financial statement), or the management report (this is the primary narrative report of companies, dubbed as annual report, business review, management discussion and analysis, etc. depending on the country).
If you are interested in CSR information in the financial reports, I have a working paper on that here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1927232.
If you are interested in CSR information in the management report, Denmark's companies are required by law to disclose CSR information. The practices of Danish companies have been well documented in several reports: https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/CSR_and_Reporting_in_Denmark_english.pdf, http://csrgov.dk/file/319199/corporate_social_responsibility_and_reporting_in_denmark_november_2011.pdf.pdf, http://csrgov.dk/file/358879/csr_rapport_2013_eng.pdf. I also have a summary of this in comparison to the new EU non-financial reporting regime here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2606557.
Please feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions!
CSR ca be measures in many ways.
Note: i am on on process research with the same topic and my area of implementation is Egypt and there is an index that is adopted by the authorities here to measure this issue and i followed their lead.
I am pleased to see that Indian companies among many others take this issue seriously. However I stick by my earlier statement that until there is a generally recognised and scientifically justifiable definition of 'sustainability', a generally agreed and scientifically justifiable metric to measure it, together with a generally agreed and scientifically justifiable method of measuring it, we are still far from our goal.
Dear Thomas,
Great point. Despite the fact that such initiatives are now an indispensable part of sustainability/CSR efforts in the corporate world, I concur with you on the shortfallings of CSR communication of International companies in developing countries. Sustainability reporting, as a communication channel, is not as effective as BOT (and similar approaches) in LDCs. The sustainability awareness is quite low in developing countries and flashy transparency measures and cool CSR initiatives will, at best, only influence the mind of a few when people are grappling with acute social issues, where as, community reach and engagement are the part and parcel of successful CSR projects in developing countries. I have been doing some research on different aspects of this phenomenon. Part of it is soon to be published as a part of a book by Emerald, you can read the abstract here:
https://www.researchgate.net/project/Hyper-Transparency-The-Stakeholders-Uprising
or the work attached (mentioned implicitly through case studies). Unfortunately, the bulk of it (which is more related to our discussion) is still not finished. In practice, I've observed first hand that when Int. corporations go beyond CSR as a marketing and PR tool and really care about what they are doing the results not only reverberate throughout society with little effort on the side of communication but also bring economic benefits to the company (through branding and increasing trust), thus creating a business case for sustainability/CSR.
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