ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING ON THE INTERNET BY AMERICA'S TOXIC 100: LEGITIMACY AND SELF-PRESENTATION

Charles H. Cho and Robin W. Roberts
Additional contact information
Charles H. Cho: John Molson School of Business - Concordia University [Montreal]
Robin W. Roberts: UCF - University of Central Florida [Orlando]

Post-Print from HAL

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 environmental disclosure 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: Website environmental disclosure; legitimacy; self-presentation; Goffman (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-05
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00522478
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in LA COMPTABILITE, LE CONTRÔLE ET L'AUDIT ENTRE CHANGEMENT ET STABILITE, May 2008, France. pp.CD Rom

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00522478/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00522478

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().