This paper's purpose is to assess how management's perceptions regarding certain aspects of environmental reporting relate to the firm's actual reporting strategy. Toward that end, we propose a model where a firm's environmental disclosure is conditional upon executive assessments of corporate concerns. The study relies on a survey that was sent to environmental management executives from European and North American multinational firms enquiring about the determinants of corporate environmental disclosure. Responses from these executives were then contrasted with their firms' actual (...) environmental reporting practices, which was measured using a comprehensive multi-criteria grid. Results show that there is a relationship between environmental managers' attitudes toward various stakeholder groups and how those managers respond to the stakeholders via the decision to disclose and the actual disclosures made. Our model provides a perspective as to how a firm responds to the numerous stakeholders to whom it must be accountable. This accountability in turn relates to how the company communicates its actions to society in order to achieve or maintain its social legitimacy. (shrink)

This study examines a sample of three editions of 19 financial accounting and auditing textbooks (n = 57) to explore the state of accounting educational content through the coverage of five key topics (ethics, professional judgment, governance, corporate social responsibility, and fraud) and 16 accounting scandals/troubled corporations. The study method is descriptive and uses independent sample t tests to identify significant differences over time and between countries. The major findings are fourfold. First, some topics' coverage and/or scandals exist in most (...) of the sample's books based on their indexes. However, the page coverage for these topics/scandals is not overwhelming when compared to the number of pages in these texts. Second, the scandals/troubled corporations' page coverage increased between the earliest and the later editions as did a depth of coverage trend measure. Third, U.S. texts in the sample contained significantly more pages devoted to these topics and scandals than the non-adapted Canadian sample texts. Finally, and as expected, the sampled auditing texts contain significantly more pages devoted to these topics and scandals compared to the other financial accounting texts in the sample. Educators and textbook authors interested in the future of business and accounting education will find this study of interest. If reminding accounting students of the ethical dilemmas they will face in their future careers is important, then this study indicates places where coverage in this sample of texts may be enhanced either through the use of standalone supplementary ethics texts or instructor introduced sources. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.