Communicating Environmental and Ethical Performance: A Longitudinal Analysis of Annual Reports from 1998–2009

Abstract

Along with the publics’ increased demand for businesses to operate responsibly, more and more companies proactively publish their CSR-related principles and activities. A growing body of research is dedicated to the analysis of patterns in self-reported CSR performances; these studies use annual reports as a proxy for the social or environmental activities of the companies. Integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches, the aims of this paper are twofold: First, on the basis of content analysis, we examine categories of CSR-related communication that are in a second step used in a longitudinal perspective spanning twelve years, to compare how CSR motives and activities have changed over time.