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ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING ON THE INTERNET BY AMERICA'S TOXIC 100: LEGITIMACY AND SELF-PRESENTATION |
| Journal: | International Journal of Accounting Information Systems (view standing data) | | Volume: | 11 | | Issue: | 1 | | Month: | March | | Year: | 2010 | | Start Page: | 1 | | End Page: | 16 |
| Author(s): | Charles H. Cho and Robin W. Roberts |
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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.
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