Do corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports provide shareholders and stakeholders with useful information on corporate social and environmental performance or are they merely a public relations vehicle? Answer this question by reference to a variety of accounting theories. There are many definitions to Corporate Social responsibility(CSR). One most common definition is that CSR is the consideration and response of the firm to issues that are beyond the regular technical, legal, and environmental requirements of the firm. From this definition we can observe that CSR is voluntary and includes social and environmental information. As for the CSR reports their job is to explain and discuss the CSR of a particular firm by publishing
Firms within particular industries that result in creating much greater social and environmental impacts are usually expected to disclose more requirements or information in order for legitimacy to be secured. These disclosures are achieved in a form of corporate social and environmental reports or more generally called CSR reports. So basically in order for firms to maintain their legitimacy, they must always sustain the condition that exists when the firm’s value system is balanced with that of the society. As for the theories that are applied for CSR reporting that result in a possibility to end as a problem in my opinion are the instrumental theories. This group of theories presents CSR as only being as a strategic tool that strives only to achieve economic objectives, and creates wealth. One of the main representatives of this theory is the well known Friedman and he explains that the firm’s main objective toward the society it operates in is to only increase the amount of profit to the shareholders. The idea of shareholder wealth maximization can lead to unethical acts. For example many modern businesses are trans-organizations in which they have a network of factories to produce their goods, but the organization only focuses on brand management and has nothing to deal with how the factories produce final product. This has dealt to big unethical acts such as the sweatshop conditions for Nike in factories in Korea and China. But this set of