A framework for rating corporate social responsibility disclosure.

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become one of the standard business practices of our time. For companies, the overall aim is to achieve a positive impact on society as a whole while maximising the creation of shared value for the owners of the business, its employees, shareholders and stakeholders. Consequently, there has also been an increase in the number of social reporting requirements driven by regulatory bodies and stock exchanges around the world that have played a key role in advancing the field of corporate social reporting. The present study contributes to this field and by adopting Delphi method and identifying the dimensions, components and indicators of social responsibility disclosure, a framework for assessing CSR disclosure incorporating 3 dimensions, 22 components and 68 indicators was designed. Then, these dimensions, components and indicators were ranked by using expert’s views and the results show that the ratios of environmental, social and economic dimensions are 0.55, 0.35 and 0.1, respectively. Among the indicators, the measures taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, its technologies, and greenhouse gas elimination criteria with the ratio of 0.06 were considered as the most important indicator. Also, the review of CSR disclosure reports of 330 companies for year 1396 indicates that only 9 out of 68 indicators were disclosed by each of the companies on average, and in the total sample, the highest number of disclosures is related to economic indicators with 1632 cases followed by social indicators with 1490 cases and environmental indicators with only 360 cases, which represent 27.5%, 11.5%, and 7% of the disclosure cases, respectively. Meanwhile, the study shows that 85 of the 330 companies did not disclose any of the environmental indicators, which indicates that some companies still do not pay adequate attention to the most important aspect of social responsibility disclosure.