Corporate Social Reporting (CSR) in Developing Countries: A Review

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Previous reviews of CSR literature have tended to focus on developed countries. The present study extends the reviews of CSR literature to developing countries. For this purpose a classification framework using three categories has been proposed and applied in this study: (a) content analysis studies (b) managerial perceptions studies and (c) stakeholder perceptions studies. It has been observed that as compared to the developed countries few studies are available from the context of developing countries. Most of the latter studies belong to the first category. These studies have concentrated on the African and Asia-Pacific Region, particularly Singapore and Malaysia and are descriptive in nature, measuring the extent and volume of disclosures contained within the annual reports. Of late, a handful of studies have started to probe managerial motivations behind CSR via in depth interviews and have found that CSR agenda in developing countries is largely driven by external forces, viz. pressures from parent companies, international market and international agencies. On the basis of this analysis the present author has suggested some important future research questions.

Stream: Economic Sustainability

Paper: Corporate Social Reporting (CSR) in Developing Countries

I’m a lecturer in accounting at the Aston Business School. Previously I taught at the University of Toulouse Business School, France, Sheffield University Management School, UK and the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. My principal research interest lies in the area of social and environmental accounting. My teaching interests are - social and environmental accounting, financial accounting and international accounting.
Current Research
My current research focuses on corporate social reporting [CSR] from the context of developing countries. In particular, my interest is to find out why Bangladeshi managers started to disclose social and ethical information and also what are the attitudes of different Bangladeshi stakeholder groups towards this new phenomenon. My more recent interest includes case studies of CSR practices around the world, particularly UK, India and China.