CSR Disclosure, Motivation for Disclosure, and Who Matters to the Firm: Prospecting for Normative Oraganisational Practice

This chapter is focused on CSR disclosure, its motivation and who matters to the firm in terms of the import of what they report concerning their activities on the environment and the people or wider society. It is common knowledge that organisations including the MNCs often tout their commitment to social and environmental reporting/disclosure—social and environmental reporting—however, there has been challenges stemming from this practice given stakeholders’ criticism of who benefits from such reporting process. The wider stakeholders including the communities, where these firms operate, have often raised doubt about the sincerity, content, and ethical nature of these disclosures arguing that they are used for strategic purposes rather than normative practice. Thus, this chapter is premised on the notion that for a cordial, ethical, and stakeholder-centric perspective to CSR disclosure, which will help to understand who matters to these organisations, normative organisational reporting/practice is a precondition. Relying on extant, relevant literature on the phenomenon of CSR reporting, this chapter argues that a normative approach to this process will help to remove doubts in the minds of wider stakeholders about the primary aim of CSR—advancing shareholder interest, profit maximisation, strategic positioning, and legitimacy building platform—rather than ethical and stakeholder-centric motivated practice/reporting.