Investigating CSR Communication by using automatic content analysis of CSR and Annual Reports. Evidence from Chinese firms

Despite the increased academic and practitioner interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), there has been little research about the definition of what firms actually tell about their sustainability efforts on the CSR and Annual Reports (Guan & Noronha 2013; Marquis & Qian 2014). In addition, until now, scholars have mainly analysed CSR in developed countries (e.g. Gugler & Shi 2009, Morsing & Schultz 2006). Nevertheless, CSR is also adopted by Emerging Multinational Companies (EMNC) which are adopting codified sets of rules and CSR policies in order to seek legitimacy towards stakeholders (Giuliani 2014). The aim of this paper is to analyze, from a quali-quantitative point of view, the CSR or Annual Reports of the largest 74 Chinese enterprises in different industries and along a time period that goes from 1997 to 2013 and to provide evidence about their socio-environmental’ performances disclosure. We chose to focus on China because it is the largest developing country, and, as pointed out by Kolk et al. (2010), the literature about CSR in China is still scant, though Moon & Shen (2010) have found a growing salience. For the purpose of the study, we employed the content analysis technique which is a method that allows to codify text and content into groups or categories based on selected criteria, with the goal of transforming the material into quantitative data, which permit further analyses (Krippendorf 2004, Weber 1988).