How to make corporate social disclosures comparable?

Abstract

The paper aims to develop instruments supporting the comparability of social disclosures and ipso facto business transparency. This research study aims to assess the possibility of achieving social disclosure comparability based on research of the Polish listed companies and to develop an authorial tools which may support stakeholders in comparing social performance and thus help them make business decisions.To attain the goals, this article introduced practical and theoretical premises of sustainability reporting development in its social dimension. Based on that, an empirical study was conducted on the comparability of social disclosures in sustainability reporting of Polish listed (WIG20) companies. For this purpose, a social disclosure index was developed by the authors. The findings of our study indicate that corporate social disclosures can be the subject of comparisons supporting stakeholders in the decision-making process. The conducted comparability analysis refers to the comparison of the scope of disclosures between the WIG20 companies, as well as the scope of disclosures over three years, and helps us to construct the index as a tool for social disclosure benchmarking. This paper contributes to filling the gap relating the social disclosure comparability. The results of this study may help compare any social disclosures, and the proposed index may be a practical instrument of benchmarking. The research originality refers to the research niche relating to the difficult comparison of non-financial data and the scope of social disclosures in sustainability reporting. It extends the knowledge on this area by giving a new perspective on the comparison of social disclosures.