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The Frontstage and Backstage of Corporate Sustainability Reporting: Evidence from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Bill

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Abstract

While proponents of sustainability reporting believe in its potential to help corporations be accountable and transparent about their social and environmental impacts, there has been growing criticism asserting that such reporting schemes are utilized primarily as impression management tools. Drawing on Goffman’s (The presentation of self in everyday life, Doubleday, New York, 1959) self-presentation theory and its frontstage/backstage analogy, we contrast the frontstage sustainability discourse of a sample of large U.S. oil and gas firms to their backstage corporate political activities in the context of the passage of the American-Made Energy and Good Jobs Act, also known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) Bill. The ANWR Bill was designed to allow oil exploration within the most sensitive environmental areas in the Refuge and this bill was vigorously debated in the United States Congress in 2005 and 2006. Our results suggest that the firms’ sustainability discourse on environmental stewardship and responsibility contrasts sharply with their less visible but proactive political strategies targeted to facilitate the passage of the ANWR Bill. This study thus contributes to the social and environmental accounting and accountability literature by highlighting the relevance of Goffman’s frontstage/backstage analogy in uncovering and documenting further the deceptive nature of the discourse contained in stand-alone sustainability reports. In addition, it seeks to contribute to the overall understanding of the multifaceted nature of sustainability reporting by placing it in relation to corporate political activities.

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Notes

  1. Organizations have a range of stakeholders with different expectations and of varying power (e.g., Mitchell et al. 1997; Arenas et al. 2009). As pointed out by Goffman (1959), the context and setting will define what kind of impression an actor seeks to convey, and to which audience. Therefore, we could expect to see attempts of creating and managing impressions differently with respect to each group of stakeholders (see also Bozzolan et al. 2015; Cho et al. 2015). As the purpose of this paper is to illustrate the usefulness of Goffman’s frontstage/backstage analogy to corporate sustainability reporting research on a more general level, we maintain that an analysis of the interactions in regard to particular subsets of stakeholder audiences is beyond the scope of this paper.

  2. Such debate and controversy include the Canadian and US governments signing the “Agreement on the Conservation of the Porcupine Caribou Herd” (July 1987) aimed at protecting the species from damage to its habitat and migration routes; a bill allowing drilling that was stopped when the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened (March/April 1989); another legislation allowing drilling voted by the Republican-majority House and Senate but vetoed by President Clinton (1996); a controversy about reports issued by the U.S Geological Survey about the quantities and location of oil (1987 and 1998); and a series of votes about the status of the ANWR in the House of Representative and the Senate ranging from pushing, approving, and rejecting bills that allowed drilling.

  3. After failing to include Arctic Refuge drilling in the final budget reconciliation bill, Senator Stevens (R-AK) made a last attempt to include language in the Defense Appropriations conference report. This attempt drew bipartisan opposition and the Arctic drilling language was ultimately abandoned (League of Conservation Voters 2005).

  4. This was done through House roll-call vote 209.

  5. Corporate PACs are “political committees established and administered by corporations, labor unions, membership organizations or trade associations” and “can only solicit contributions from individuals associated with connected or sponsoring organization” (Federal Election Commission 2010). They result from the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) and its subsequent amendments in 1974, 1976, and 1979 (Cho 2007). According to Smith (2000), the key commodity bestowed upon PACs is access; this means that “during deliberations leading to relevant legislative decisions, corporate political action committees (PACs) […] get a respectful hearing from House and Senate members who have won election with the PAC’s help” and that “corporations giving PAC contributions frequently receive ‘face time’ from members […] and gain a valuable opportunity to present their perspectives” (p. 119). For more details on PACs, see Cho et al. (2006, 2008), Roberts et al. (2003) and Thornburg and Roberts (2008).

  6. We acknowledge that corporations are not the only party seeking to promote their own interest, as in environmental issues there is also a range of NGOs and other social actors engaging in political lobbying (see Doh and Guay 2006). Some NGOs lobbied for the protection of ANWR. We do not discuss such pro-environment lobbying here, as our paper focuses on discussing the differences within corporations’ activities in light of Goffman’s theatrical metaphor.

  7. While three other U.S. oil and gas companies made PAC contributions during the study period (Devon, El Paso and Valero), they did not issue sustainability reports in parallel, which lead to their exclusion from our analysis. As an indication of the market share, we computed the 3-year average proportion of our sample firms’ revenues over the overall total revenues of all firms with the same Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. Those codes were 1311 (Crude Petroleum and Natural Gas), 1389 (Oil and Gas Field Services), and 2911 (Petroleum Refining).

  8. For the sake of simplicity, we consider under “sustainability reports” any corporate stand-alone report labelled “Environmental, health and safety report,” “Sustainable development report,” “Social responsibility report,” “Corporate citizenship report,” “Corporate responsibility report,” or any other similar title.

  9. Four companies had three sustainability reports available for years ended 2003 to 2005, respectively. In addition to its sustainability reports, one of these companies had also their Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) reports for those three years. One company had sustainability reports only for years ended 2003 and 2004, another had them only for years ended 2004 and 2005, and a third had a 2003 report and one combined report for years ended 2004–2005.

  10. The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) publishes annually a report called “How the xxth Congress voted on Energy and the Environment”. It provides ratings on how each Congressman performed in voting for legislations related to the environment. In addition, it provides an objective roll-call vote record of key environmental legislations. The 109th Congress voted on numerous issues, which included the ANRW Bill.

  11. A preliminary multiple regression was conducted to calculate Mahalanobis distance (to identify outliers) and examine multicollinearity among the three predictors. Tolerance for all variables was greater than 0.1, indicating that multicollinearity is not a problem in this model. There were two cases with a Mahalanobis distance greater than χ 2(3) = 16.266 (critical value at p = 0.001). We ran the model both with and without these outliers and the results were qualitatively the same.

  12. We define political strategies as the means used by corporations to influence public policy—these include but are not limited to including political contributions, PACs, and lobbying (see Hillman and Hitt 1999; Mack 1997).

  13. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives serve two-year terms. Hence, as we focus our analysis on vote for/against the ANRW Bill in March 2006, we examined membership and PAC contribution data from 2004 to 2006 within their respective election cycles.

  14. Similar to Cho et al. (2008), the DECOMP-based fit measure generated by the Tobit regression model is taken and labeled as the adjusted pseudo R 2.

  15. This model is a binary logistic regression, and thus the Nagelkerke R 2 provides a logistic analogy to the adjusted R 2 in OLS regression.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Carmen Correa (discussant at the 35th EAA Annual Congress), Bruno Oxibar (discussant at the 32eme AFC Congrès), Leslie Paik, Hyemi Shin, and the participants of the 22nd International Congress on Social and Environmental Accounting Research in Saint Andrews, the 4th GECAMB Conference on Environmental Management and Accounting (Portuguese CSEAR Conference) in Leiria, the 2011 Conference of the American Accounting Association’s Public Interest Section Mid-Year Meeting in Chicago, the 32ème Congrès de l’Association Francophone de Comptabilité (AFC) in Montpellier, the International Workshop on The Role of Business in Society and the Pursuit of the Common Good at ESSEC Business School in Cergy, the 2012 Alternative Accounts Conference in Quebec City, the 35th European Accounting Association Congress in Ljubljana, the 2016 McMaster Symposium in Hamilton and research workshops and seminars at Seoul National University, Pusan National University, Aston Business School, the University of Ottawa, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, the University of Central Florida, the University of Maastricht, Dongguk University, Yonsei University, HEC Lausanne, Concordia University, KAIST, CEIBS, the Ivey Business School, the Schulich School of Business and the Université Toulouse 1 Capitole for their valuable comments and feedback. Charles Cho also acknowledges the financial support provided by the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the ESSEC Research Centre (CERESSEC). Michelle Rodrigue acknowledges the financial support from Université Laval’s Programme de soutien à la recherche de la Faculté des sciences de l’administration and the École de comptabilité.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESSEC Business School, 1 Avenue Bernard Hirsch CS 50105, 95021, Cergy Pontoise Cedex, Cergy, France

    Charles H. Cho

  2. School of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, 33014, Finland

    Matias Laine

  3. Kenneth G. Dixon School of Accounting, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL, 32816-1400, USA

    Robin W. Roberts

  4. École de comptabilité, Faculté des Sciences de l’Administration, Université Laval, Pavillon Palasis-Prince 2325 rue de la Terrasse, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

    Michelle Rodrigue

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  1. Charles H. Cho
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  2. Matias Laine
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  4. Michelle Rodrigue
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Correspondence to Matias Laine.

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Cho, C.H., Laine, M., Roberts, R.W. et al. The Frontstage and Backstage of Corporate Sustainability Reporting: Evidence from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Bill. J Bus Ethics 152, 865–886 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3375-4

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