Title

Environmental Reporting On The Internet By America'S Toxic 100: Legitimacy And Self-Presentation

Keywords

Environmental performance; Goffman; Internet reporting; Legitimacy; Self-presentation; Website environmental disclosure; XBRL

Abstract

This study uses Goffman's self-presentation theory to examine corporate website environmental disclosures from an organizational legitimacy perspective. We argue that corporations use Internet reporting and website platforms to project a more socially acceptable environmental management approach to public stakeholders. We argue further that this disclosure activity is often de-coupled from their actual environmental performance. To test these conjectures, we refine and employ a comprehensive disclosure evaluation metric to assess both the content and the presentation of these types of disclosures and utilize a firm's America's Toxic 100 toxic score, a newly developed measure based on the US Environmental Protection Agency's toxics release inventory (TRI) data, to proxy for environmental performance. Based on empirical tests of four size-matched samples, our findings support our conjectures, showing that worse environmental performers provide more extensive disclosure in terms of content and website presentation. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publication Date

3-1-2010

Publication Title

International Journal of Accounting Information Systems

Volume

11

Issue

1

Number of Pages

1-16

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.accinf.2009.12.003

Socpus ID

77149159451 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/77149159451

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