Volume and Tone of Environmental Disclosure: A Comparative Analysis of a Corporation and its Stakeholders

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to provide a description of disclosures arising from various stakeholder groups in the social sphere. As such, we extend Rodrigue's article “Contrasting Realities: Corporate Environmental Disclosure and Stakeholder-Released Information” (2014. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 27 [1]: 119–149) by conducting a case study to examine and compare corporate and stakeholder communications made over a three-year period. We specifically focus on the volume and tone of environmental disclosures. We explore the topics emphasised by each party in their respective disclosures and analyse their tone by categorising the information as positive, negative or neutral. Through a detailed quantitative analysis, we highlight the differences in how various actors portray the organisation and its activities. We argue that this is of relevance since neither corporate nor stakeholder disclosures are merely passive reflections of reality, but rather, they play a part in constructing, forming and legitimating particular discourses and constructions of worldviews within society. Our findings demonstrate how these disclosures differ with regard to the topics covered and the tone used; hence, the stakeholder disclosures we analysed present an alternative view of the organisation's activities. By systematically analysing and comparing different parties’ disclosures, we contribute to the literature by extending our understanding of stakeholder information releases in the light of corporate disclosures.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the participants of the 2012 CSEAR United Kingdom Conference, the 2013 CSEAR North America Conference and the 2014 CSEAR France Conference for their helpful feedback, comments and suggestions. The financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ordre des Comptables Agréés du Québec and the Faculté des Sciences de l'Administration of Université Laval (FSA ULaval) is gratefully acknowledged. Matias Laine acknowledges the financial support provided by the Academy of Finland (Project 250478).

Notes

1 AC merged with Bowater at the end of 2007. The resulting company AbitibiBowater (now called Resolute Forest Products) is not part of this study.

2 Jantzi Research merged with Sustainalytics in 2009 and now operates under the latter designation.

3 Within their approach, Guthrie et al. suggest (among other steps) using information disclosed by sustainability ranking organisations to develop an industry-specific coding scheme. Given that a sustainability ranking organisation (Jantzi Research) is one of the perspectives under study, this step of the approach was not undertaken to avoid introducing bias in the coding scheme.

4 There are limitations to volumetric content analysis (Beck, Campbell, and Shrives 2010), and we acknowledged them as limitations of our study.

5 In the same vein, within the environmental management category, environmental management systems received the most description (untabulated), offering investors concrete information on how the firm manages its environmental risks and impacts. Finally, within pollution abatement, air emissions are covered relatively more thoroughly (untabulated) – particularly greenhouse gases, a recurring theme in the investment community (e.g. Kolk, Levy, and Pinkse 2008; Solomon et al. 2011).

6 While at least two stakeholders made 10% or more of their disclosures in the pollution abatement category, we do not report these results graphically, since they are mostly similar to those of environmental management.