Environmental reporting on the internet by America's Toxic 100: Legitimacy and self-presentation

Charles H. Cho and Robin W. Roberts

International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 2010, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-16

Abstract: This study uses Goffman's self-presentation theory to examine corporate website environmental disclosures from an organizational legitimacy perspective. We argue that corporations use Internet reporting and website platforms to project a more socially acceptable environmental management approach to public stakeholders. We argue further that this disclosure activity is often de-coupled from their actual environmental performance. To test these conjectures, we refine and employ a comprehensive disclosure evaluation metric to assess both the content and the presentation of these types of disclosures and utilize a firm's America's Toxic 100 toxic score, a newly developed measure based on the US Environmental Protection Agency's toxics release inventory (TRI) data, to proxy for environmental performance. Based on empirical tests of four size-matched samples, our findings support our conjectures, showing that worse environmental performers provide more extensive disclosure in terms of content and website presentation.

Keywords: Internet reporting; Website environmental disclosure; Legitimacy; Self-presentation; Goffman; Environmental performance; XBRL (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijoais:v:11:y:2010:i:1:p:1-16

DOI: 10.1016/j.accinf.2009.12.003

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