ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of corporate reporting of the environmental, social and sustainability performance of organisations. Over recent decades, societal expectations of organisation performance have broadened and deepened. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability reporting are now key areas of stakeholder concern and an important and explicit underlying tenet of the relationship between society and the corporation. Public reporting has emerged from the growing need for external stakeholders to understand the underlying performance of the organisation across various dimensions. External reporting of CSR usually manifests as disclosure in the annual report or sustainability report or through an organisation’s website. Indeed, there is continuous research revealing the extent and scale of uptake of voluntary sustainability reporting by corporations globally (KPMG 2011). Voluntary CSR reporting is, however, not a new phenomenon. Early research had highlighted a long history of voluntary social and environmental reporting by corporations. For instance, Hogner (1982), in a study of US Steel (1901–1980), observed that CSR was an old idea with a practical base and that the frequency of occurrence depended on a matrix of societal forces. Guthrie and Parker (1989), in a study of 100 years of reporting by BHP, concluded that CSR reporting had a long history and that it did not appear to match significant social events (with the possible exception of environmental issues in the 1970s). More recent empirical research has observed a steady increase in the level of CSR reporting, while attempting to link observed reporting practices with either internal or external factors has had mixed results (see Hahn and Kühnen 2013 or Fifka 2013 for a meta-analysis of the literature).
