Corporate Social Disclosure in China and Japan: An Introduction

Corporate social disclosure (CSD), an important branch of social accounting (Gray, 2002), has been widely examined since the 1970s. Gray et al. (1996: 3) define social accounting as “the process of communicating the social and environmental effects of organisations’ economic actions to particular interest groups within society and to society at large”. During that time, managers were under pressure to disclose the wider consequences that corporate activities may have on the environment, human resources and consumer policies (McKie, 1974). Rapid globalization in the 1980s and 1990s forced corporations to realize that their operations and activities do not take place in a vacuum but have immense consequences both locally and globally (Macintosh et al., 2000). Consumers started to have an increased awareness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and expected more transparency in corporate affairs. The disclosure of CSR information became very much in demand by various stakeholder groups, including governmental agencies and pressure groups. This was especially the case after the 2001 US accounting scandals of Enron and Arthur Andersen when CSD and reputation risk were seen to be related (Bebbington et al., 2008). Nowadays, CSD is still voluntary in most countries, although some European countries have mandatory requirements on environmental disclosure (Oxfam Hong Kong, 2010).