Global corporate responsibility disclosure: A comparative analysis of field,national,and global influences

Abstract

Spanish

French

In the domain of global corporate responsibility (GCR), international organizations have promoted disclosure as a means to address global concerns with corporations’ social and environmental practices. Business disclosure practices, however, remain uneven across organizations and countries. This article examines various field, national, and global factors that facilitate or mitigate GCR disclosure among corporations worldwide. Analyzing unique quantitative data on more than 1800 disclosure reports by corporations in more than 50 countries, this article presents two main findings. First, field-level factors are prominent but they influence disclosure levels in different ways. Third-party verification encourages greater disclosure, while peer organizations mitigate disclosure. Second, national and global factors influence disclosure differently in developed and developing countries. Business disclosure in developed countries is impacted by national factors while, in developing countries, disclosure is significantly influenced by global factors. The article concludes by discussing the implications of GCR disclosure for wider global corporate governance concerns.

Keywords

Corporate responsibility disclosure and transparency global corporate governance

Beginning in the 1990s, highly publicized corporate scandals reignited older debates on the impact of corporations worldwide on human rights, labor, and the environment (Kell and Ruggie, 1999). Responding to these controversies, state and non-state actors institutionalized various global corporate responsibility (GCR) frameworks that specify voluntary compliance with corporate responsibility principles. Despite their widespread appeal among the business community (Shanahan and Khagram, 2006), however, critics charge that business participation in such GCR frameworks is merely symbolic (cf. Bartley, 2007; Deva, 2006; Locke et al., 2009). This article considers one prominent mechanism through which GCR frameworks encourage corporate responsibility: the disclosure of business practices surrounding their social and environmental practices. It examines the extent to which global businesses disclose key aspects of their social and environmental practices and compares the field, national, and global factors that encourage such disclosure.

Looking into corporate responsibility disclosure gives researchers further insight into the growing worldwide GCR movement (Brown et al., 2009). One of the central tenets of global corporate responsibility is that it offers an efficacious, private non-state solution to global corporate governance concerns. However, if businesses do not apply adopted global principles to what they disclose about their practices, this suggests that scholars and practitioners should reconsider whether encouraging business disclosure actually fosters greater corporate responsibility or is merely a case of ‘organized hypocrisy’ (Brunsson, 2002). In this article, I evaluate business disclosure practices in the context of three key external determinants: (1) organizational field-level factors, in particular the influence of peer and third-party organizations, (2) national factors of the countries that businesses are situated in, and (3) global factors, specifically the influence of economic and institutional globalization. Existing research has considered these factors but few studies have weighed their combined influence at the cross-national level (cf. Gallego, 2006; Mio, 2010). Additionally, I also examine if these factors encourage or mitigate business disclosure of GCR practices distinctly in developed and developing regions of the world. While corporate responsibility research has largely highlighted firm-level or national factors, this article argues that it is global factors that reveal the dynamics of business disclosure practices, especially in their institutional and developmental contexts. This line of reasoning draws on world society and institutional perspectives on corporate responsibility (Bromley and Meyer, 2015; Lim and Tsutsui, 2012; Meyer et al., 2015) that document how organizations have increasingly incorporated wider social expectations of organizational accountability that derive from an increasingly interconnected global society.

I conduct cross-national quantitative analyses of more than 1800 disclosure reports submitted by businesses from 54 countries to the Global Reporting Initiative, currently the world’s most widely adopted GCR disclosure framework, and present two main findings. First, field-level factors are prominent but they influence GCR disclosure in different ways. Third-party verification encourages greater disclosure, while peer organizations mitigate disclosure. Second, national and global factors influence disclosure levels differently in developed and developing regions of the world. Disclosure in developed countries is impacted by national factors while, in developing countries, disclosure is more significantly influenced by global factors. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for GCR disclosure and studies of global corporate governance.

Global corporate responsibility disclosure in context

Since the 1970s, international organizations initiated various corporate responsibility frameworks in response to the lack of international coordination around regulating transnational corporations’ activities (Sagafi-Nejad, 2008). Likewise, in the 1990s, global actors introduced new global corporate responsibility frameworks to address governance concerns of the post-Cold War era of economic globalization (Bartley, 2007; Dashwood, 2012; Haufler, 2001; Segerlund, 2010; Shanahan and Khagram, 2006). As a solution to global corporate governance concerns, the GCR movement has sought to normalize global principles of corporate responsibility, provide learning and informational resources for corporations, and promote transparency and the voluntary disclosure of corporations’ social and environmental practices (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012). Corporate endorsement of these GCR frameworks is high and rising (Utting and Marques, 2010), with the participation of thousands of corporations, including many of the world’s largest transnational corporations. Nevertheless, their voluntary and non-binding nature remain points of contention among critics who question their efficacy in encouraging global corporate responsibility (Deva, 2006; Smith, 2010).

In recent years, research on GCR has begun looking beyond simple membership counts to further ascertain the impact of private, non-state responses to global corporate responsibility concerns. Whether through case studies of industry implementation of GCR frameworks or cross-national quantitative analyses of corporate practices, this growing body of research has increasingly identified corporate disclosure as key to understanding the extent to which corporations are taking GCR concerns seriously. Corporate disclosure on social and environmental practices is at the core of the global corporate responsibility movement (Legendre and Coderre, 2012) and GCR frameworks encourage their participating corporations to voluntarily disclose their activities in accordance with framework principles (Brown et al., 2009). Many of these GCR frameworks encouraged corporations to include social and environmental governance concerns in their annual financial reports. Such calls for ‘triple bottom line’ (financial-social-environmental) disclosure (Elkington, 1997; Fung et al., 2008) were attempts by civil society groups and corporate ratings organizations to push for more transparency from corporations through the use of itemized and standardized reporting templates to document corporations’ impact on the natural environment and the wider society (Locke et al., 2009). In varying degrees, corporations that participated in GCR frameworks were responsible for communicating their social and environmental impact as part of their commitment to the principles of those frameworks.

Although corporations worldwide are increasingly submitting disclosures, to what extent do these disclosures incorporate the principles of those GCR frameworks? Like simple membership in GCR frameworks, corporate disclosure of social and environmental practices may act as signals that corporations employ to communicate certain intentions to their stakeholders (Prakash and Potoski, 2006). Of course, corporations may perfunctorily submit a GCR report to signal corporate responsibility while not actually ensuring if the report discloses any of the items required by the framework or if the report in fact adequately reflects the principles of the said framework. This negligence in GCR disclosure is likely to be pervasive since corporations are subject to competing pressures to be profitable as well as socially responsible (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012; Margolis and Walsh, 2003; Vogel, 2005). Either for a lack of resources and expertise or through deliberate deception, corporations may be unable or unwilling to fully adhere to the disclosure standards of the GCR frameworks. Non-compliance with disclosure principles casts considerable doubt on the efficacy of the GCR movement in promoting transparency about corporations’ social and environmental practices, weakening the case for GCR as a potential solution to global corporate governance concerns.

As such, what possible factors either encourage or mitigate business disclosure in the realm of global corporate responsibility? In the wider literature, contextual factors have been shown to significantly shape business participation in global corporate responsibility. In the institutional and world society perspectives, corporations are conceived as being constituted by the wider global society as organizational agents with civic responsibilities (Meyer et al., 2015). With the expansion of the organizational form beyond national borders, organizations were seen not only as neutral vehicles for collective action but were also circumscribed as actors with responsibilities to the wider society (Bromley and Meyer, 2015). As profit-seeking entities, corporations are particularly subject to these forms of social control and are increasingly pressured to incorporate progressive global norms in the world society that emphasize social and environmental issues and organizational transparency and accountability (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012). It is thus within this wider global environment in which GCR disclosure has emerged as a salient concern for corporations that seek to appear as legitimate entities to the wider society.

Therefore, beyond internal firm characteristics, the external environment in which businesses operate is likely to be crucial in steering corporations towards corporate responsibility (Crouch and Maclean, 2011; Smith et al., 2010; Tsutsui and Lim, 2015). These studies, however, are only suggestive because they are limited to corporations of certain sizes, industries, and countries (Gallego, 2006; Mio, 2010), or have focused on simple membership counts in the GCR movement instead of levels of disclosure (Berliner and Prakash, 2012; Lim and Tsutsui, 2012). An important reason for these restrictions is practical: data on GCR and the corporations that comprise the movement are either unavailable or inconsistent across various countries, making cross-national generalizations about the GCR movement difficult. Nevertheless, these initial studies suggest that existing field, national, and global factors may be significant in shaping disclosure in the GCR movement. If these contextual factors encourage corporations to become active participants in the GCR movement, they may very well also shape how those corporations subsequently disclose their social and environment practices.

As with other aspects of organizational behavior, existing research strongly suggests that GCR disclosure varies according to factors in businesses’ external environments (Gallego, 2006; Legendre and Coderre, 2012; Mio, 2010). To anticipate the discussion below, this article weighs up three main contextual factors. First, there are field-level factors where businesses are influenced by other actors in the organizational field (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) in which they reference or interact with (Hoffman, 2001). Second, business GCR disclosure may also be shaped by wider national factors where specific legal or political institutions encourage or constrain options for corporate responsibility (Matten and Moon, 2008). Third, corporations operate in different environments that are open to global influences, where cross-national institutional (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012) and economic pressures (Potoski and Prakash, 2005) may steer business GCR disclosure in distinct ways. Because of the GCR movement’s global nature, cross-national comparisons of these factors can further highlight their differential effects.

The Global Reporting Initiative: Guidelines and disclosure

This article analyzes levels of disclosure by corporations that are participants in the Global Reporting Initiative. By level of disclosure, I do not mean how much a corporation discloses about its social and environmental practices but, rather, the extent to which a corporation has applied GCR principles to what it discloses. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an international organization that was founded in 1997 and is a pioneer in the GCR movement’s push to encourage corporations to disclose their social and environmental practices. The GRI is currently the world’s most widely adopted disclosure framework, with reports submitted by more than 6000 corporations in over 60 countries. Standard GRI reports follow a set of guidelines that consists of more than 80 quantitative and qualitative performance indicators of economic performance, the environment, labor, human rights, society, and product responsibility. Table 1 lists the performance indicators of the GRI’s G3 guidelines with a detailed example of its human rights disclosure standards (Global Reporting Initiative, 2006). Reports submitted to the GRI are publicly available on the GRI’s online database.¹ Currently, the volume and scope of GRI reports far exceed any comparable global framework for corporate disclosure and thus qualify the GRI as representative of the core dimensions of the GCR movement. Other international organizations that feature corporate responsibility concerns, such as the UN Global Compact, the OECD, and ISO, often promote GRI guidelines as templates for corporate disclosure.

Table 1.

GRI sustainability reporting guidelines (G3).

Disclosurestandard	Performanceindicators
Environmental	Materials; energy; water; biodiversity; emissions, effluents, and waste; products and services; compliance; transport
Human rights	Investment and procurement practices; non-discrimination; freedom of association/collective bargaining; child labor; forced and compulsory labor; security practices; indigenous rights
Labor practices	Employment; labor–management relations; occupational health and safety; training and education; diversity and equal opportunity
Product responsibility	Customer health and safety; product and service labeling; marketing communications; customer privacy; compliance
Economic	Economic performance; market presence; indirect economic impact
Example: Human rights disclosure standards
HR1	Percentage and total number of significant investment agreements that include human rights clauses or that have undergone human rights screening
HR2	Percentage of significant suppliers and contractors that have undergone screening on human rights and actions taken
HR3	Total hours of employee training on policies and procedures concerning aspects of human rights that are relevant to operations, including the percentage of employees trained
HR4	Total number of incidents of discrimination and actions taken
HR5	Operations identified in which the right to exercise freedom of association and collective bargaining may be at significant risk, and actions taken to support these rights
HR6	Operations identified as having significant risk for incidents of child labor, and measures taken to contribute to the elimination of child labor
HR7	Operations identified as having significant risk for incidents of forced or compulsory labor, and measures to contribute to the elimination of forced or compulsory labor
HR8	Percentage of security personnel trained in the organization’s policies or procedures concerning aspects of human rights that are relevant to operations
HR9	Total number of incidents of violations involving rights of indigenous people and actions taken

In 2006, to ensure transparency in submitted reports, the GRI began requiring participating corporations to declare the ‘application levels’ of their disclosures, that is, the extent to which corporations’ reports applied the GRI’s reporting guidelines and performance indicators. This practice ensures that corporations would not be able to simply submit a corporate responsibility report with minimal or no application of GRI standards. Corporations declare their reports in accordance with three application level clusters – ‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’ – and have the option of self-declaring these application levels or having them verified by the GRI or some third-party organization. In the three-year period beginning in 2006, when the GRI introduced its G3 guidelines and application level requirements, corporations submitted more than 1800 disclosure reports to the GRI. Based on data collected from the GRI’s database, Table 2 presents descriptive statistics on the disclosure levels of these submitted reports in relation to various firm-level and contextual factors.

Table 2.

GRI G3 reports and disclosure levels, 2006–2008.

Disclosurelevel	Company sizeN = 1788		Third-party verificationN = 1822		Legal traditionN = 1822		National wealthN = 1822
Disclosurelevel	MultinationalenterprisesN = 288(16%)	OtherenterprisesN = 1500(84%)	Third-partyverifiedN = 726(40%)	Self-declaredN = 1096(60%)	Common lawN = 528(29%)	Civil lawN = 1294(71%)	Higher-incomecountriesN = 387(21%)	Lower-incomecountriesN = 1435(79%)
A N = 504 (28%)	60 (21%)	441 (29%)	386 (53%)	118 (11%)	84 (16%)	420 (32%)	101 (26%)	403 (28%)
B N = 444 (24%)	73 (25%)	367 (24%)	220 (30%)	224 (20%)	124 (23%)	320 (25%)	89 (23%)	355 (25%)
C N = 315 (17%)	37 (13%)	271 (18%)	117 (16%)	198 (18%)	123 (23%)	192 (15%)	88 (23%)	227 (16%)
Undeclared N = 559 (31%)	118 (41%)	421 (28%)	3 (0%)	556 (51%)	197 (37%)	362 (28%)	109 (29%)	450 (31%)

Table 2 reveals that, of all the 1822 GRI reports submitted in the three-year period beginning in 2006, only 28% of the reports were ‘full disclosures’ (application level ‘A’) that applied the fullest extent of GRI standards. According to the GRI, such full disclosures are to include a disclosure on the submitting corporation’s profile, its management approach, and responses on ‘each core and Sector Supplement indicator with due regard to the materiality Principle by either: a) reporting on the indicator or b) explaining the reason for it omission’ (Global Reporting Initiative, 2006: AL2). The remaining 72% of report submissions either did not report on all GRI indicators, including explanations for omissions, or did not also disclose the corporation’s management approach to GCR concerns. A full 31% of reports did not declare if their submissions applied any of the GRI’s reporting guidelines.

Table 2 also presents data that cross-tabulates the disclosure level of submitted GRI reports with various firm and contextual factors. Data on company size and third-party verification were obtained from the submitted GRI reports while legal tradition and national wealth are country factors that were obtained from cross-national databases. I describe the sources of these data in a subsequent section. The second column (‘company size’) indicates that 21% of reports submitted by multinational corporations were A-level disclosures, compared with a greater proportion of reports submitted by corporations of other sizes at 29%. The third column (‘third-party verification’) indicates the proportion of GRI reports whose disclosure levels were verified by a third-party organization (either the GRI or an external auditor). Overall, a greater proportion of GRI reports that were externally checked by a third-party organization have higher levels of disclosure, with 53% of externally checked reports declared at the A-level, compared with 11% of self-declared reports. Among externally verified reports, close to 0% are ‘undeclared,’ i.e., they declined to report if their submissions applied any level of the GRI’s reporting guidelines, compared with 51% of self-declared reports. The fourth column distinguishes between the legal traditions of reporting corporations’ country of origin. Among reports submitted by corporations from civil law countries, 32% were A-level disclosures, compared with 16% of reports submitted by corporations from common law countries. Of the reports submitted from civil law countries, 28% did not declare a disclosure level, compared with 37% of reports from common law countries. The final column distinguishes between reports submitted by corporations from either higher- or lower-income countries and indicates that the proportion of reports at different disclosure levels are comparable. Nevertheless, 23% of reports from higher-income countries are C-level disclosures, compared with 16% of reports from companies from lower-income countries.

These initial statistics indicate that there is considerable variation in GRI disclosures and that there may be important external factors that shape how corporations apply GCR principles to what they disclose of their corporate responsibility practices. Furthermore, these trends in disclosure and reporting within the GRI also suggest that, while global corporate responsibility is now a legitimate global institution, the application of principles to actual disclosure is still markedly uneven.

Field, national, and global influences on global corporate responsibility disclosure

Field-level factors

A common theme in institutional sociology is that organizations are significantly influenced by their peers and other organizations that they interact with. In new institutional theory, such interactions comprise an organizational field where ‘organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products’ (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 148). In the organizational field, peer organizations exercise mimetic, normative, and coercive pressures to influence organizations to adopt similar policies and behaviors (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Since field-level factors are the most proximate influences on organizations, one can expect strong influences on changes in organizational behavior. In the realm of corporate responsibility, field-level factors have been shown to encourage business support for philanthropy, the community, and attention to environmental concerns (Galaskiewicz, 1991; Hoffman, 2001). I consider two main field-level influences: the influence of peer organizations that have higher levels of disclosure and the impact of third-party organizations that directly verify business disclosure reports.

First, it is likely that corporations considering disclosure of their social and environmental practices do so in the context of a higher prevalence of previous corporations that have already engaged in similar practices. Through normative processes, for instance, corporations may be exposed to and learn about disclosure practices from other peer corporations that they interact with in national business forums and associations. To the extent that a country has a greater number of corporations with existing disclosure practices, corporations may be pressured to adopt the same type of practice that they perceive to be the appropriate form of corporate responsibility (Nikolaeva and Bicho, 2011). The prevalence of corporate responsibility disclosure in a country may also facilitate corporations learning how to report on their practices from other corporations that have previously submitted disclosures (Brown et al., 2009). Such learning processes may be salient, as most corporations do not have dedicated or trained executives who are adept at applying itemized disclosure standards to their existing practices. Having existing models to imitate may greatly facilitate the disclosure process. As such:

H1a: Reports from corporations in countries with a greater number of existing reports are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure.

Second, one common criticism of contemporary efforts at corporate responsibility is that corporations only engage in corporate responsibility as ‘public relations,’ a symbolic attempt to legitimize their existence as providers of goods and services. Critics often cite the lack of disclosure or minimal effort as evidence that the GCR movement merely obscures egregious corporate behavior (Smith, 2010), especially in a global context where supply chains cross national boundaries (Davis et al., 2008; Locke et al., 2009). Such criticisms of the GCR movement stem from the voluntary nature of GCR frameworks, where there are few overt sanctions on corporations that advertise their participation but fail to comply with framework standards. Thus, in an effort to buttress the legitimacy of their disclosure practices, corporations may engage with third-party organizations that can externally verify their corporate responsibility efforts. Third-party organizations such as non-governmental actors, professional auditors, and labor and environmental groups are increasingly involved in verifying companies’ compliance with voluntary corporate responsibility standards (Bartley, 2007; Locke et al., 2009). With the external verification of corporate claims to responsible disclosure, I expect that:

H1b: Reports that have been verified by third-party organizations are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure.

National factors

A variety of national factors may also shape the degree to which corporations fully apply GCR standards in their disclosures. In particular, I consider the extent to which countries have more open legal, political, and economic systems that encourage business attention to their wider stakeholders (and not just their shareholders). One factor that some studies cite as significant but has not been fully explored in subsequent research is the legal tradition of the country (Ball et al., 2000; Simnett et al., 2009). Countries that have a common law tradition, such as in the United States and the United Kingdom, have corporate governance systems that privilege private sector interests (Matten and Moon, 2008) and corporations in the common law tradition are more likely to cater to the narrow interests of their shareholders. Where corporate responsibility is likely to risk or diminish shareholder returns, corporations may be less likely to engage in full corporate responsibility disclosure. On the other hand, countries that have a civil law tradition, such as in France or Germany, have corporate governance systems that include the participation of a wider range of stakeholders, including labor, non-governmental, and state interests (cf. Jackson and Apostolakou, 2009). Corporations that operate in the civil law tradition are thus more likely to engage in practices that are deemed salient by this wider constituency of stakeholders, including corporate responsibility, more transparent disclosure of business practices, and use of third-party verification of those practices. We may thus expect disclosure to be mitigated for corporations in common law countries while corporations in civil law countries may engage in more transparent disclosure in reports of their social and environmental practices. Therefore:

H2a: Reports from corporations in civil law countries are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure.

Countries that are developed democracies may also be conducive for corporations to practice greater disclosure. Countries that have more democratic political systems are likely to have citizens and public interest groups that are willing and able to lobby corporations on issues that concern the wider society (Vogel, 1989). Since GCR principles center on values, such as the protection of human rights, labor, and the environment, that cohere with modern democratic dispositions, we expect corporations in more democratic countries to also view corporate disclosure as appropriate for responsible corporate citizens. Likewise, more economically wealthy countries are also associated with greater emphasis on ‘post-material’ concerns (Welzel et al., 2003), in which citizens are likely to push corporations to go beyond legal compliance and profit-maximization to embrace progressive values that are prevalent in GCR principles, leading to greater levels of transparency and disclosure. Thus:

H2b: Reports from corporations in more democratic countries are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure.

H2c: Reports from corporations in wealthier countries are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure.

Global factors

In recent years, research on corporate responsibility has shown that global factors are significant influences on corporations’ engagement with the GCR movement. Corporations in countries that have higher levels of trade and foreign investment, for example, are more likely to engage with GCR concerns (Mosley and Uno, 2007; Potoski and Prakash, 2005). Corporations from countries with higher levels of economic globalization, through cross-national transactions, are more likely to acquire information about corporate responsibility from foreign companies. Greater levels of economic globalization can also facilitate socialization processes where corporations are exposed to norms about appropriate corporate social behavior (i.e., disclosure and reporting) from their international business partners. Finally, economic globalization may also prompt corporations to disclose their social and environmental practices to signal corporate responsibility to potential overseas business partners, especially when other means of signaling are not available (Prakash and Potoski, 2006). Therefore:

H3a: Reports from corporations in countries with greater levels of economic globalization are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure.

Other global factors may also exercise similar effects. Corporations in countries with greater ties to global institutions, for example, may be more likely to participate in the GCR movement through the practice of disclosure (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012). Research in the world society approach to globalization has argued that such global institutional connections often push domestic actors to adopt models of organizational behavior that conform with globally sanctioned values that highlight human rights and the natural environment (Frank et al., 2000; Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui, 2005). These world society ties often take the form of memberships in international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), where INGOs help diffuse organizational models across countries. Through this process, domestic corporations are likely to perceive models of corporate responsibility practice, such as GCR disclosure, as legitimate and taken-for-granted. Otherwise, INGOs may also more directly pressure companies to conform to global standards of corporate responsibility. Recent research has shown how world society ties are positively associated with corporations participating in the GCR movement (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012) and thus may also positively facilitate GCR disclosure:

H3b: Reports from corporations in countries with a greater number of world society ties are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure.

Developed and developing countries

Among these various national and global factors, research has also begun to examine if the GCR movement operates differently in distinct regions of the world. Although global corporate responsibility has gained increasing legitimacy among various state and non-state actors, the growing uniformity of GCR standards may obscure how national and global factors work in different regions to shape GCR disclosure (Utting and Marques, 2010). Historically, the GCR movement emerged from attempts in the 1970s by developing countries to pressure the UN to regulate transnational corporations. Although UN bodies began working on a Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations, they were decisively defeated by developed countries like the United States that wanted either a voluntary set of principles or no code at all (Sagafi-Nejad, 2008). Although subsequent research has not further examined these trajectories, the history of the GCR movement suggests that developing countries endorsed binding regulations on corporations and were more likely to pursue those regulations through international organizations. Developed countries, on the other hand, were more skeptical of global approaches to regulating corporations, seeking only non-committal solutions to global corporate governance concerns (Sagafi-Nejad, 2008). Recent research also observes markedly different conceptions of business–society relationships in different regions of the world (Jackson and Apostolakou, 2009; Matten and Moon, 2008).

H4: Global factors are more likely to encourage higher disclosure levels in developing countries while national factors are more likely to encourage higher disclosure levels in developed countries.

Data and methodology

I conducted multivariate time-series analyses of data comprising 1822 disclosure reports that various companies across different countries submitted to the Global Reporting Initiative in the three-year period beginning in 2006 when the GRI first introduced its G3 reporting guidelines (Global Reporting Initiative, 2006).² These reports were submitted by corporations belonging to 54 countries.

The dependent variable, disclosure level, was coded as an ordinal variable based on the GRI’s different application levels (i.e., the degree to which a corporation’s disclosure applied GRI indicators). Following Legendre and Coderre (2012: 186), I adopted a seven-point ordinal scale where the minimum value of 1 indicated a report with ‘undeclared’ application levels (i.e., lowest level of disclosure) and a maximum value of 7 that indicated an ‘A+’ report that fully applied GRI indicators (i.e., highest level of disclosure). I obtained these disclosure data directly from the GRI’s online database.

The variable third-party verification is a binary variable that indicates if a reporting corporation submitted its report for external verification by either the GRI or a third-party organization. I coded reports with no third-party verification as 0 while reports that were externally verified were coded as 1. The variable GRI socialization is the number of existing GRI reports submitted in a given year in a given company’s country of origin. Because particular countries may have a larger pool of candidate corporations to begin with, I standardize this socialization measure by the size of a country’s economy (log GDP values of a particular year).³ I obtained these variables together with the disclosure reports available from the GRI’s online database.

The national-level variable legal tradition was coded as a binary variable with 0 indicating a company from a country with a common law tradition and 1 indicating a company from a country with a civil law tradition. I derived the assignment of a country’s legal tradition from classifications from the CIA World Factbook’s online database.⁴ The variable democracy measures the level of democracy of a company’s country of origin and consists of an autocracy–democracy scale ranging from 0 to 10 from Marshall and Jaggers’ (2008) Polity IV Project database. The variable economic development measures the gross domestic product per capita of a company’s country of origin from the World Bank’s (2008) World Development Indicators database.

The global-level variable economic globalization is an index of actual cross-national economic flows consisting of trade, foreign direct investment, and portfolio investment compiled from the World Bank, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the International Monetary Fund (Dreher, 2006; Dreher et al., 2008). I obtained the data from the KOF Index of Globalization’s online database.⁵ The variable world society ties is a count measure of the number of INGOs to which residents of a given country belong. I include only active internationally-oriented non-governmental organizations from the Union of International Associations’ Yearbook of International Organizations (2005–2007).

I include two control variables in the analyses. First, I control for firm size, as larger corporations are more likely to have more resources to devote to corporate responsibility (Hackston and Milne, 1996), to be more visible in the public domain (Bertels and Peloza, 2008), and be more likely to be scrutinized by social movement organizations (King, 2008; Soule, 2009), making disclosure more probable (Prado-Lorenzo et al., 2009). In corporate responsibility research, company size is routinely shown to be significantly associated with firm orientation towards corporate responsibility (Udayasankar, 2008) or at the very least a basic confounding factor to be accounted for (Orlitzky, 2001). The GRI database classified each reporting corporation as either a ‘small-medium enterprise,’ ‘large enterprise,’ or ‘multinational enterprise.’ I coded these categories as an ordinal variable from 1 to 3 respectively. Second, I control for corporations that belong to high-risk industries as they tend to be targeted by activists and more closely scrutinized (Dashwood, 2012; Legendre and Coderre, 2012). In existing research, industry type has been shown to be significantly associated with companies’ corporate responsibility transparency and disclosure (Campbell, 2003; Hackston and Milne, 1996; Legendre and Coderre, 2012). Businesses in high-risk industries were coded following Hackston and Milne’s (1996) classification of nine high-risk industries – petroleum, chemical, forest and paper, automobile, airline, oil, agriculture, alcohol and tobacco, and media and communications – as 1 (‘high-risk’) and all other corporations were coded as 0 (‘low-risk’). Other possible control variables may be salient, such as share of company revenues from outside the home country or level of industry globalization. However, such granular data, which are accessible for public companies or companies from developed countries in conventional financial databases, are not consistently available for companies in the GRI data, which include a wide range of both public and private companies from more than 90 developed and developing countries. Nevertheless, the GRI data do include size and industry indicators, which I have employed in the analyses.

Table 3 provides descriptive statistics, including breakdowns of the dependent variable (GRI report disclosure levels) by core parameters (country type, region, company size, industry risk, and socialization type). Table 4 presents a collinearity matrix of the independent variables in the analyses.

Table 3.

Descriptive statistics of variables in the analyses.

	Mean	SD	Min.	Max.
Company size	2.056	.513	1	3
Industry-at-risk	.133	.340	0	1
GRI socialization/log GDP	5.384	4.266	0	15.739
Third-party verification	.398	.490	0	1
Legal tradition	.710	.454	0	1
Democracy	9.214	1.771	0	10
Economic development	28,905.55	11,817.02	1298.826	88,335.05
Economic globalization	73.783	11.721	40.939	97.476
World society ties	2856.551	924.747	202	4218
GRI report disclosure levels by core parameters
Countries
Higher-income countries	3.654	2.37	1	7
Lower-income countries	3.522	2.263	1	7
Region
Africa	2.492	1.822	1	7
Asia	3.206	2.457	1	7
Europe	4.100	2.329	1	7
Latin America	3.840	2.186	1	7
North America	2.725	1.892	1	7
Oceania	3.282	2.315	1	7
Company size
Small/medium	3.415	2.186	1	7
Large	3.789	2.344	1	7
Multinational	3.201	2.289	1	7
Industry
Low-risk	3.679	2.336	1	7
High-risk	3.293	2.268	1	7
Socialization
Self-verified	2.423	1.846	1	7
Third-party verified	5.441	1.731	1	7

Table 4.

Collinearity matrix of variables in the analyses.

	GRI socialization/log GDP	Third-partyverification	Legaltradition	Democracy	Economicdevelopment	Economicglobalization	World societyties	Companysize
Third-party verification	.0661**
Legal tradition	−.1873***	.1789***
Democracy	.3480***	−.0022	−.1748***
Economic development	.4519***	−.0304	−.3390***	.5197***
Economic globalization	.1360***	.0930**	−.0373	.4696***	.5124***
World society ties	.4344***	.1022***	.0776**	.5283***	.5499***	.5542***
Company size	.0203	−.0428	−.1091***	.0500*	.1211***	−.1166***	.0426
Industry-at-risk	−.0682**	−.0409	.0652**	−.0264	−.0349	−.0128	−.0039	.0018

p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

The data I analyze pose some limitations, representing only a restricted time frame, but at the benefit of not having to narrow the scope of inquiry to companies of a certain size (e.g., only Fortune 500 companies), industry, or country of origin. A more comprehensive assessment of levels of GCR disclosure entailed accepting these limitations to arrive at more generalizable observations of the GCR movement as it applies to the full scope of corporations that the movement includes. The data I analyze represent a wider sample of corporations’ disclosure reports in the GRI framework than has previously been explored in earlier studies (Gallego, 2006; Legendre and Coderre, 2012; Mio, 2010).

The quantitative analyses presented below employed ordinal logistic regression models of factors influencing corporations’ levels of disclosure in their GRI reports.⁶ All independent variables were lagged by one year to guard against possible endogeneity. All models use robust standard errors adjusted for clustering within companies’ country of origin (Beck and Katz, 1995; Williams, 2000) and include country fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity (Baier and Bergstrand, 2007). I also performed the same analyses on two sub-samples of the data, dividing companies’ countries of origins between higher-income and lower-income countries. I designate a company’s country of origin higher-income if it is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and if its per capita gross national income is greater than the OECD’s benchmark for official development assistance (i.e., above US$12,275).⁷ All other countries are designated lower-income. Table 5 lists all 54 countries in the data with 27 countries each for higher-income and lower-income countries.

Table 5.

Countries in the analyses (N = 54).

Higher-income countriesN = 27			Lower-income countriesN = 27
Australia	Hungary	Slovakia	Argentina	Indonesia	Philippines
Austria	Ireland	South Korea	Bolivia	Jordan	Russia
Belgium	Israel	Spain	Brazil	Kenya	South Africa
Canada	Italy	Sweden	Chile	Malaysia	Thailand
Czech Republic	Japan	Switzerland	China	Mexico	Turkey
Denmark	Netherlands	UK	Colombia	Mongolia	Ukraine
Finland	New Zealand	USA	Croatia	Nigeria	Venezuela
France	Norway		Ecuador	Pakistan
Germany	Portugal		Egypt	Papua New Guinea
Greece	Singapore		India	Peru

Results

Table 6 presents results of the ordinal logistic regression models predicting disclosure levels of corporations’ GRI reports. Model 1 indicates results for all corporations’ countries of origin, Model 2 for the sub-sample of corporations from higher-income countries, and Model 3 for the sub-sample of corporations from lower-income countries. Country fixed effects are applied to all models but I do not report their coefficients due to space limitations.

Table 6.

Ordinal logistic regression of GRI disclosure levels, 2006–2008.

Variables	All countries	Higher-income countries	Lower-income countries
Variables	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Field
GRI socialization/log GDP	−.093* (.046)	−.076(.044)	−.410*** (.091)
Third-party verification	2.591*** (.182)	2.549*** (.223)	2.768*** (.286)
National
Legal tradition	.990*** (.170)	.971*** (.204)	5.750(3.380)
Democracy	−.309(.211)	−.295(.261)	−.279(.549)
Economic development	.0002(.0001)	.0001(.0001)	.0004(.0002)
Global
Economic globalization	−.015(.041)	.020(.049)	−.226(.120)
World society ties	.0001(.0001)	.000002(.0001)	.003*** (.0003)
Control
Company size	.128(.147)	.052(.144)	.694(.492)
Industry-at-risk	−.047(.182)	−.007(.214)	−.098(.317)
Number of countries	53	27	26
Observations	1778	1396	382
Pseudo R²	.171	.175	.167

Note: Unstandardized coefficients, robust standard errors in parentheses.

Country fixed effects are estimated for all models but coefficients are not reported due to space limitations.

p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001 (two-tailed tests).

Looking across all models in Table 6, field-level factors exercise the most consistent effects on levels of business GCR disclosure. GRI socialization is negatively associated with higher levels of GRI disclosure. This is consistent across all models but goes against the direction of influence predicted by H1a. The effect is statistically significant for corporations in all countries (Model 1) and in developing countries (Model 3). This suggests that peer organizations, through the existing number of GRI reports in a corporation’s country of origin, may not actually be encouraging corporations to more comprehensively apply GRI indicators to their disclosures. In fact, the prevailing GCR culture seems to have the opposite effect: corporations may be viewing GCR participation as the appropriate form of behavior but lack the will or ability to follow through with comprehensive disclosure of their social and environmental practices. Third-party verification has positive and significant effects on corporations’ GRI disclosure levels, holding all other factors equal. The statistically significant effects are consistent across all models, indicating very strong support for hypothesis H1b that corporations that submit their reports for external verification are more likely to apply a greater level of GRI indicators in their disclosures.

Among national-level factors, countries’ civil law tradition is positively associated with higher levels of GRI disclosure. The effect is statistically significant across all models except Model 3 (corporations in lower-income countries). Recall that countries with civil law traditions tend to privilege more inclusive stakeholder models of corporate governance. This is strong support for hypothesis H2a, which states that GRI reports from corporations in civil law countries are more likely to have higher levels of disclosure. The effects of democracy and economic development in a corporation’s country of origin are not significant on GRI disclosure levels and, therefore, neither H2b nor H2c are supported.

Turning to global factors, I find no support for H3a as economic globalization does not have statistically significant effects on levels of GRI disclosure. There is partial support for H3b as world society ties is positively associated with higher levels of GRI disclosure but the effect is only statistically significant for corporations in lower-income countries (Model 3). Global institutional pressures through international organizations seem to be encouraging corporations in lower-income countries to more comprehensively apply GRI framework principles to their disclosure reports.

Comparing the impact of these factors between the full sample of companies in all countries and between companies in higher-income and lower-income countries reveals different dynamics of corporate disclosure depending on the type of companies’ countries of origin. Although third-party verification has consistent effects on GRI disclosure levels across all models, national and global influences exercise more distinct effects. For corporations in higher-income countries, civil law traditions have positive and significant effects on GRI disclosure levels while global factors have no significant impact at all. On the other hand, civil law traditions in lower-income countries are not significant factors for corporations’ disclosure levels, which are instead significantly influenced by GRI socialization and world society ties in their countries of origin. These patterns show support for H4.

Among the control variables, company size has a positive relationship with companies’ GRI disclosure levels, all other factors equal, although none of these effects is statistically significant. Similarly, the effect of a corporation being in a high-risk industry is negatively associated with the level of its GRI disclosure but none of its effects reaches statistical significance

Discussion and conclusion

Adherents of global corporate responsibility argue that transnational private regulation can act as a viable solution to global corporate governance concerns (cf. Brown et al., 2009; Locke et al., 2013). As part of these efforts to foster greater transparency and accountability, corporations in the GCR movement are encouraged to voluntarily disclose their social and environmental practices according to core global principles and standards. Nevertheless, global corporate responsibility disclosure may merely reflect a disconnect between corporate commitment to GCR principles and the application of those principles to what corporations report about their social and environmental practices. This article has examined business GCR disclosure in a cross-national context, enabling the explicit comparison of various field, national, and global factors on corporations’ disclosure practices. The results from this article’s analyses suggest two main findings about how GCR disclosure is significantly shaped by multiple contextual factors.

First, field-level factors are significant predictors of businesses’ disclosure practices. While this seems intuitive, as field-level influences are the most proximate factors for corporations, these factors actually push business GCR disclosure in opposite directions. While third-party verification encourages greater disclosure, peer socialization mitigates businesses’ levels of disclosure, especially for corporations in developing countries. The increase in third-party verification and overall corporate disclosure reports suggest that taken-for-granted notions of corporate citizenship may help reorient the way corporations approach business–society relationships but criticisms that the GCR movement is only symbolic may be warranted at this stage of the movement’s development (Smith, 2010). Existing GCR reporting alone may not be pushing the GCR movement’s disclosure objectives forward and factors such as stakeholder involvement and third-party verification may help close the gap between report submission and application of disclosure standards. Peer organizations’ adoption of GCR disclosure practices also seems to discourage higher levels of disclosure in subsequent businesses, suggesting that corporations may feel pressured to participate in GCR frameworks but lack either the will or the resources to follow up by applying framework principles in their subsequent action. This seems particularly true of businesses in developing countries.

Second, national and global factors have distinct impacts on businesses, depending on whether they are in developed or developing regions of the world. Disclosure levels from businesses in developed countries are more likely to be influenced by national factors, while disclosure in developing countries is influenced by global factors. Confirming previous studies, this article finds that corporations in countries with civil law traditions are more likely to disclose their practices in greater accordance with GCR standards (Legendre and Coderre, 2012). Since the tradition of civil law encompasses a wider range of stakeholders in corporate governance, including not only shareholders but also labor, environmental, and public interest groups, this indicates that stakeholder engagement is key to enhancing corporate transparency and adherence to GCR standards in disclosure reporting. This also suggests that a narrower conception of the beneficiaries of responsible corporate citizenship (as in some variants of the ‘business case for corporate responsibility’) may mitigate disclosure and may not be efficacious in promoting greater adherence to standards in the GCR movement. Nevertheless, this national factor seems more salient in developed countries. It may be the case, for example, that stakeholder models of corporate governance in the civil law tradition are more developed in higher-income countries, such that greater stakeholder involvement translates into greater application of GCR standards.

Furthermore, the analyses indicate that world society ties have a positive and significant influence on corporate disclosure in lower-income countries, suggesting that global factors’ impact on disclosure levels may be more salient in developing regions of the world when compared with corporations in developed countries that are shielded from those global pressures (Lim and Tsutsui, 2012). This suggests that voluntary GCR disclosure, which has its roots in the western developed world, is applied to companies in the developing world through global channels more than the national channels that seem to be influencing disclosure levels among companies in the developed world. Compared with higher-income countries, corporations in lower-income countries may not have the benefit of relying on developed stakeholder engagement practices, as even existing GCR peers seem to be pushing companies to apply fewer GRI standards to their report submissions. However, these observations also indicate that corporations in lower-income countries may be able to overcome domestic obstacles to corporate disclosure through greater engagement with global institutional channels (Utting and Marques, 2010). In this regard, INGOs may be ameliorating the lack of stakeholder engagement in lower-income countries, facilitating corporations’ efforts to achieve greater transparency in accordance with GCR disclosure standards.

These two main findings of divergent effects across multiple levels suggest contributions to existing perspectives. Research on corporate responsibility has overwhelmingly focused on proximate firm factors in explaining patterns of business engagement with the wider society. Nevertheless, as this article’s findings suggest, once patterns of business–society relationships are cast in the wider global context, domestic and economic factors seem to cede some of their explanatory significance to normative global forces that shape corporate responsibility practices, in the form of organizational verifiers, legal contexts, and world society ties. The impact of these normative and institutional influences suggests that studies of corporate responsibility should move beyond just economic or firm-centered models to also consider the wider social constitution of organizations as they have expanded over the course of the twentieth century (Bromley and Meyer, 2015; Meyer et al., 2015). This study’s findings also suggest contributions to the world society perspective on globalization by showing how regional differences can be essential in driving global processes (cf. Hironaka, 2014). While cross-national research emphasizes global standards that are in many cases established and promoted by developed countries or Anglo-American polities (Meyer, 2010), attention to regional dynamics can also reveal how the global diffusion of organizational practices can be shaped as much by the civil law polities of continental Europe or lower-income countries (Longhofer and Schofer, 2010).

In conclusion, business disclosure of corporate responsibility practices has important implications for global corporate governance given that non-state actors that may not be beholden to the same institutional constraints as conventional state actors. Although the GCR movement has grown substantially in the past decade, there may be reasons to be cautious when it comes to its global reach and the corporate disclosure it promotes. The GCR movement is currently markedly uneven in its impact on corporations’ disclosure of their social and environmental practices. The findings from this article’s analyses of corporations’ disclosures to the world’s most prominent GCR reporting framework, the Global Reporting Initiative, indicate that levels of corporate disclosure vary considerably across countries and are subject to various field, national, and global factors. Furthermore, those factors shape the trajectory of corporate disclosure practices in distinct ways when comparing between field-level influences and between developed and developing countries. As such, in its current stage of development, the GCR movement has yet to adequately offer itself as a viable and comprehensive solution to the area of transparency and corporate disclosure concerns.

Nevertheless, this article’s findings also indicate that corporations are beginning to approach the issue of corporate disclosure more explicitly and this is likely due to the increasing legitimacy of the GCR movement and its efforts to reshape the way corporations conceive of business–society relationships. Future research can expand on these findings by analyzing disclosure and reporting in other GCR frameworks that seek to accomplish similar objectives as well as expanding the scope of analysis to include a wider variety of corporations and countries. As the GCR movement develops, data on its participants and the impact of their practices will undoubtedly accumulate, offering researchers the opportunity to further examine the impact of business disclosure practices on global corporate governance. As the GCR movement expands its sphere of influence to encompass more corporations across different regions of the world, it is likely that field, national, and global factors will continue to facilitate or mitigate business GCR disclosure along distinct trajectories. To be viable, however, the GCR movement should ensure that those different pathways lead to the same outcome: greater transparency around corporate responsibility practices in conformity with the full range of the movement’s core principles.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Alwyn Lim is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California with research interests in globalization, organizations, and institutions. His research examines the convergence of state and non-state actors around the global corporate responsibility movement.

References

Baier

Bergstrand

(2007) Do free trade agreements actually increase members’ international trade? Journal of International Economics 71: 72–95.

Ball

Kothari

Robin

(2000) The effect of international institutional factors on properties of accounting earnings. Journal of Accounting and Economics 29: 1–51.

Bartley

(2007) Institutional emergence in an era of globalization: The rise of transnational private regulation of labor and environmental conditions. American Journal of Sociology 113: 297–351.

Beck

Katz

(1995) What to do (and not to do) with time-series cross-section data. American Political Science Review 89: 634–650.

Berliner

Prakash

(2012) From norms to programs: The United Nations Global Compact and global governance. Regulation and Governance 6: 149–166.

Bertels

Peloza

(2008) Running just to stand still? Managing CSR reputation in an era of ratcheting expectations. Corporate Reputation Review 11: 56–72.

Bromley

Meyer

(2015) Hyper-Organization: Global Organizational Expansion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown

de Jong

Lessidrenska

(2009) The rise of the Global Reporting Initiative: A case of institutional entrepreneurship. Environmental Politics 18: 182–200.

Brunsson

(2002) The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations. Chichester: Wiley.

10.

Campbell

(2003) Intra- and intersectoral effects in environmental disclosures: Evidence for legitimacy theory? Business Strategy and the Environment 12: 357–371.

11.

Crouch

Maclean

(eds) (2011) The Responsible Corporation in a Global Economy. New York: Oxford University Press.

12.

Dashwood

(2012) The Rise of Global Corporate Social Responsibility: Mining and the Spread of Global Norms. New York: Cambridge University Press.

13.

Davis

Whitman

MVN

Zald

(2008) The responsibility paradox. Stanford Social Innovation Review Winter: 31–37.

14.

Deva

(2006) Global Compact: A critique of the UN’s ‘public-private’ partnership for promoting corporate citizenship. Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce 34: 107–151.

15.

DiMaggio

Powell

(1983) The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review 48: 147–160.

16.

Dreher

(2006) Does globalization affect growth? Evidence from a new index of globalization. Applied Economics 38: 1091–1110.

17.

Dreher

Gaston

Martens

(2008) Measuring Globalization – Gauging its Consequence. New York: Springer.

18.

Elkington

(1997) Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of the 21st Century. Oxford: Capstone Publishing.

19.

Frank

Hironaka

Schofer

(2000) The nation-state and the natural environment over the twentieth century. American Sociological Review 65: 96–116.

20.

Fung

Graham

Weil

(2008) Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency. New York: Cambridge University Press.

21.

Galaskiewicz

(1991) Making corporate actors accountable: Institutional building in Minneapolis-St. Paul. In: Powell

DiMaggio

(eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 293–310.

22.

Gallego

(2006) The use of economic, social and environmental indicators as a measure of sustainable development in Spain. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 13: 78–97.

23.

Global Reporting Initiative (2006) Sustainability reporting guidelines. Amsterdam. Available at: www.globalreporting.org/resourcelibrary/G3.1-Guidelines-Incl-Technical-Protocol.pdf

24.

Hackston

Milne

(1996) Some determinants of social and environmental disclosures in New Zealand companies. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 9: 77–108.

25.

Hafner-Burton

Tsutsui

(2005) Human rights in a globalizing world: The paradox of empty promises. American Journal of Sociology 110: 1373–1411.

26.

Haufler

(2001) Public Role for the Private Sector: Industry Self-Regulation in a Global Economy. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

27.

Hironaka

(2014) Greening the Globe: World Society and Environmental Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.

28.

Hoffman

(2001) From Heresy to Dogma: An Institutional History of Corporate Environmentalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

29.

Jackson

Apostolakou

(2009) Corporate social responsibility in Western Europe: An institutional mirror or substitute? Journal of Business Ethics 94: 371–394.

30.

Kell

Ruggie

(1999) Global markets and social legitimacy: The case for the ‘Global Compact’. Transnational Corporations 8: 101–120.

31.

King

(2008) A political mediation model of corporate response to social movement activism. Administrative Science Quarterly 53: 395–421.

32.

Legendre

Coderre

(2012) Determinants of GRI G3 application levels: The case of the Fortune Global 500. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 20: 182–192.

33.

Lim

Tsutsui

(2012) Globalization and commitment in corporate social responsibility: Cross-national analyses of institutional and political-economy effects. American Sociological Review 77: 69–98.

34.

Locke

Amengual

Mangla

(2009) Virtue out of necessity? Compliance, commitment, and the improvement of labor conditions in global supply chains. Politics and Society 37: 319–351.

35.

Locke

Rissing

Pal

(2013) Complements or substitutes? Private codes, state regulation and the enforcement of labour standards in global supply chains. British Journal of Industrial Relations 51: 519–552.

36.

Longhofer

Schofer

(2010) National and global origins of environmental association. American Sociological Review 75: 505–533.

37.

Margolis

Walsh

(2003) Misery loves companies: Rethinking social initiatives by business. Administrative Science Quarterly 48: 268–305.

38.

Marshall

Jaggers

(2008) Polity IV Project: Political regime characteristics and transitions, 1800–2006. Available at: www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html

39.

Matten

Moon

(2008) ‘Implicit’ and ‘explicit’ CSR: A conceptual framework for a comparative understanding of corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review 33: 404–424.

40.

Meyer

(2010) World society, institutional theories, and the actor. Annual Review of Sociology 36: 1–20.

41.

Meyer

Pope

Isaacson

(2015) Legitimating the corporation in a world society. In: Tsutsui

Lim

(eds) Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–72.

42.

Mio

(2010) Corporate social reporting in Italian multi-utility companies: An empirical analysis. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 17: 247–271.

43.

Mosley

Uno

(2007) Racing to the bottom or climbing to the top? Economic globalization and collective labor rights. Comparative Political Studies 40: 923–948.

44.

Nikolaeva

Bicho

(2011) The role of institutional and reputational factors in the voluntary adoption of corporate social responsibility standards. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 39: 136–157.

45.

Orlitzky

(2001) Does firm size confound the relationship between corporate social performance and firm financial performance? Journal of Business Ethics 33: 167–180.

46.

Potoski

Prakash

(2005) Green clubs and voluntary governance: ISO 14001 and firms’ regulatory compliance. American Journal of Political Science 49: 235–248.

47.

Prado-Lorenzo

J-M

Gallego-Alvarez

Garcia-Sanchez

(2009) Stakeholder engagement and corporate social responsibility reporting: The ownership structure effect. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 16: 94–107.

48.

Prakash

Potoski

(2006) Racing to the bottom? Trade, environmental governance, and ISO 14001. American Journal of Political Science 50: 350–364.

49.

Sagafi-Nejad

, with Dunning

(2008) The UN and Transnational Corporations: From Code of Conduct to Global Compact. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

50.

Segerlund

(2010) Making Corporate Social Responsibility a Global Concern: Norm Construction in a Globalizing World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

51.

Shanahan

Khagram

(2006) Dynamics of corporate responsibility. In: Drori

Meyer

Hwang

(eds) Globalization and Organization: World Society and Organizational Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 196–224.

52.

Simnett

Vanstraelen

Chua

(2009) Assurance on sustainability reports: An international comparison. The Accounting Review 84: 937–967.

53.

Smith

(2010) Power, interests, and the United Nations Global Compact. In: Porter

Ronit

(eds) Globalization, Private-Sector Authority, and New Modes of Democratic Policy-Making. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 89–109.

54.

Smith

Bhattacharya

Vogel

Levine

(eds) (2010) Global Challenges in Responsible Business. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

55.

Soule

(2009) Contention and Corporate Social Responsibility. New York: Cambridge University Press.

56.

Tsutsui

Lim

(eds) (2015) Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World. New York: Cambridge University Press.

57.

Udayasankar

(2008) Corporate social responsibility and firm size. Journal of Business Ethics 83: 167–175.

58.

Union of International Associations (2005–2007) Yearbook of International Organizations, various issues. München: KG Saur Verlag.

59.

Utting

Marques

(eds) (2010) Corporate Social Responsibility and Regulatory Governance: Towards Inclusive Development? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

60.

Vogel

(1989) Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America. New York: Basic Books.

61.

Vogel

(2005) The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

62.

Welzel

Ingelhart

Klingemann

H-D

(2003) The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis. European Journal of Political Research 42: 341–379.

63.

Williams

(2000) A note on robust variance estimation for cluster-correlated data. Biometrics 56: 645–656.

64.

World Bank (2008) World Development Indicators. New York: World Bank Publications.