Advanced Accounting Theory Project

Do corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports provide shareholders and stakeholders with useful information on corporate social and environmental performance or are they merely a public relations vehicle? Answer this question by reference to a variety of accounting theories. There are many definitions to Corporate Social responsibility(CSR). One most common definition is that CSR is the consideration and response of the firm to issues that are beyond the regular technical, legal, and environmental requirements of the firm. From this definition we can observe that CSR is voluntary and includes social and environmental information. As for the CSR reports their job is to explain and discuss the CSR of a particular firm by publishing non financial CSR such as annual reports and/or Sustainability reports and there are other ways to express CSR of a firm such as websites or press releases. As for the accounting theories they include legitimacy, stakeholders, and institutional theories which all fall under the Political economy theory and there are the CSR theories which are branched into the positive theories which include Instrumental, political, and integrative theories, and the other branch of CSR theories is the Ethical ( normative theories) .So as for the rest of the context of this essay I will be implementing some accounting theories into my discussion to see if they will lead to an final answer to this essay.
I’ll start off with the political economy theories. First ill talk about stakeholder and legitimacy theories which have many similarities. Stakeholder theory which imposes that a firm’s main purpose to success is creating as much value as possible for the stakeholders. In order to achieve sustainability of this theory executives must always keep interest in customers, communities, employees, and shareholders. So from the research I made I have discovered that CSR reporting benefits a company stakeholders by improving and formalizing communication