Legitimacy and the Internet: An Examination of Corporate Web Page Environmental Disclosures

Environmental reporting on the internet by America's Toxic 100: Legitimacy and self-presentation

“…However, Patten and Crampton (2004) suggest this vision may be overly optimistic based on the growing evidence that, similar to financial report environmental disclosure,…”

“…The PERI aggregates the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) TRI data from the facility level to a parent company level, ranks those firms by toxic score, and publishes the list of the top 100 (i.e., America's Toxic 100) on their own website. The assessment of both the content and the presentation of Internet website environmental disclosure is performed by a comprehensive disclosure evaluation metric that we develop based on the works of Jones et al (1998), Marston and Polei (2004) and Patten and Crampton (2004). More importantly, we situate Goffman's (1959) 3 sociological theory of self-presentation within the organizational legitimacy framework and apply it to obtain a better understanding of the online environmental reporting motivations and practices of US corporations.…”

“…Finally and more recently, Patten and Crampton (2004) investigated (1) whether the Internet was in fact being used to further environmental communication with stakeholders and (2) whether website environmental disclosure, like financial report environmental disclosure, was merely "a function of corporate attempts at legitimation. "…”

“…Based on their analysis, Patten and Crampton (2004) suggest that SustainAbility/UNEP's views of the Internet as a medium for higher corporate social and environmental accountability may be "overly optimistic" and that the focus of website environmental disclosure appeared to be another tool used to legitimate the corporation rather than adding to accountability.…”

“…There are 21 items in the content section (all items were drawn from Patten and Crampton, 2004) and 20 items in the presentation section (only applicable and relevant items were selected from Jones et al, 1999 andMartson andPolei, 2004). All of the items can be measured on a dichotomous yes/no basis, 15 quantified as 1 and 0, respectively.…”