Responds to the widely‐reported methodological problems which have arisen in research into corporate social and environmental reporting. Reports on an attempt to build a database of UK company social and environmental disclosure. The motivation behind the database is an attempt to provide, first, a data set which both refines and develops earlier attempts to capture and interpret such disclosures; second, a data set covering several years to permit longitudinal analysis; and third, a public database for accounting researchers who wish to pursue, in a systematic and comparable way, more focused hypotheses about social and environmental reporting behaviour. Explains the motivation for, the background to, and process of establishing such a database and attempts to expose the difficulties met and the assumptions made in establishing the structure of the data capture. The resultant database has already proved useful to other UK researchers. Aims to help researchers in other countries to develop their own methods of enquiry in a manner which will avoid them having to reinvent wheels and will produce results which will be broadly comparable at an international level.

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Takes as its departure point the criticism of Guthrie and Parker by Arnold and the Tinker et al. critique of Gray et al. Following an extensive review of the corporate social reporting literature, its major theoretical preoccupations and empirical conclusions, attempts to re‐examine the theoretical tensions that exist between “classical” political economy interpretations of social disclosure and those from more “bourgeois” perspectives. Argues that political economy, legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory need not be competitor theories but may, if analysed appropriately, be seen as alternative and mutually enriching theories from alternative levels of resolution. Offers evidence from 13 years of social disclosure by UK companies and attempts to interpret this from different levels of resolution. There is little doubt that social disclosure practice has changed dramatically in the period. The theoretical perspectives prove to offer different, but mutually enhancing, interpretations of these phenomena.

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