The organizational literature on emerging industries has emphasized the need for institutional entrepreneurs - actors who give the new activity legitimacy and determine its patterns of behaviour. However, little empirical research has been carried out on the strategies that institutional entrepreneurs employ in order to achieve legitimacy for their activity. In this article, we suggest that an institutional entrepreneur can use the development of measurement tools as a strategy to develop its own legitimacy and power. By looking at a French entrepreneurial company’s development of tools to measure corporate social performance, we analyse how measurement tools influence the legitimacy of an industry and the systemic power within it. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for research into measurement tools in the areas of management or business and society.

What is the impact of voluntary corporate environmental disclosures on the cost of equity? The present study will attempt to answer this question. The empirical research is based on companies listed in the French SBF 120 stock market index. In 2006, most of these companies devoted a section of their annual report to environmental actions, yet fewer than 20% of them actually published a separate report dedicated to the issue of sustainable development. Regardless of the selected medium, the environmental topics receiving the most attention in corporate reporting are pollution, natural resources and recycling. The determinants associated with environmental disclosure are: company size, financial leverage, and the number of financial analysts monitoring company stock. This study does not lead to concluding that companies disclosing environmental information necessarily lower the cost of equity.

International audienceThis paper explores corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the franchising sector. More specifically, using regulation theory, stakeholder–agency theory, transaction cost analysis, and literature on plural form, along with an empirical study conducted on the franchising sector in the French market, we find significant and positive relationships between chain size and the extent ofcorporate social disclosure (CSD) on franchisors’ websites and between the percentage of companyowned units within the chain and the extent of CSD on franchisors’ websites. Moreover, though findings reveal that 86.03 percent of the 136 sampled franchisors communicate about at least one of their CSR activities on their websites, differences in terms of highlighted categories (e.g., environment, human resources, and products) and the extent of available CSR information exist

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