A Rationale for Corporate Social Reporting: Theory and Evidence From Organizational Research

Reflections on the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Project

“…Recently Tinker has identified these latter papers as contributing to the emergence in the UK of "Marxist oriented critical accounting research" (Tinker, 2000). His subsequent advocacy of a political economy of accounting perspective confirms that, in Tinker's view at least, it was necessary to enroll a distinctly radical, Marxist theory based sociological perspective (Tinker, 1980; see also Cooper, 1980;Tinker et al, 1982;Cooper & Sherer, 1984), although a concurrent contribution with Lowe is noticeably more guarded (Tinker & Lowe, 1980). Related but following a bit later, Hopper and Armstrong with other colleagues 7 were advocating and employing labour process theory 8 in understanding how accounting, especially managerial accounting, was implicated in the capitalist labour process.…”

External Reporting by Uk Universities: An Exploratory Study of Accounting Change

“…Most frameworks do, however, share three common elements: the organisation; an information flow; and the information recipient. (Although Hines, 1988 andTinker, 1985 raise problems with even this basic schema). Laughlin and Gray (1988), in an attempt to articulate the reporting activity at its most basic and most general, employ a simple systems model (derived from Lowe, 1972;and Lowe and McInnes, 197 1) which explicitly identifies these three elements as: the 'focal' organisation (that is the organisation in which the observer is interestedthe reporting organisation in this case); an information output from the focal organisation (typically, but by no means necessarily, the annual report); and the 'substantial environment' interacting with the organisation.…”

“…Moreover, assumptions that the information produced by the focal organisation is simply demand driven typically in some decision-usefulness frameworkare unsatisfactory in principle (Laughlin and Puxty, 1981). Various theoretical approaches have been proposed in the accounting literature in which the management of an organisation is much more active in determining the reporting form, (Tinker and Lowe, 1980;Laughlin andPuxty, 1981 andBenston, 1982;and Watts and Zimmerman, 1986). One such articulation is the 'organisational control' approach to explaining external reporting by organisations (Laughlin and Puxty, 1981) which suggests that the external reports of organisations can be seen as one 'resource' with which management can seek to influence the substantial environment so as to effect a control strategy on behalf of the focal organisation.…”

Is Corporate Responsibility Converging? A Comparison of Corporate Responsibility Reporting in the USA, UK, Australia, and Germany

“…It suggests that firms may be engaging in 'satisficing' behavior (Cyert and March, 1963;Simon, 1955), only reporting in such areas as required by the standards body and that this greater monitoring does not extend to other areas of CSR where it is not required. This recalls early work on corporate social reporting by Tinker and Lowe (1980), which argued that CSR reporting, like other firm behavior, needs to be viewed as the outcome of a satisficing process involving trade-offs between multiple parties within the firm. Good performance in one area of CSR does not appear to automatically lead to good performance in other areas.…”