University of Tasmania, Australia

Mr Nicholas Andrew

Graduate Research Candidate

Contact Details

Project title: A core-periphery model of voluntary CSR disclosure in corporate communications: A comparative study of multinational finance corporations

Introduction

This project will undertake a comparative analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting in all official website derived corporate communications of the world’s largest finance corporations by market capitalisation. The research seeks to specifically detect how ‘industry-type’ and ‘country-of-listing’ factors such as culture, target audience, stakeholders and listing rules impact upon the voluntary reporting of CSR, and to further enhance the predictive power of the Core/Periphery model of CSR disclosure (posited by Andrew, Wickham, O’Donohue and Danzinger (2013) in an international context.

Research Design

This longitudinal study will undertake a five stage, inductive content analysis approach, towards all official corporate communications across the 2002-03 to 2012-13 financial years to identify how these corporations have responded to serious external shocks. It is envisaged that the ten largest banking corporations will be identified by market capitalisation and cross referenced against the ten largest stock exchanges, thus creating a list of the largest multinational banking corporations that are cross listed on the largest stock exchanges by market capitalisation, while keeping the sample to an appropriate size for in-depth content analysis. Preliminary research indicates that the ten largest cross listed banks originate from North America, United Kingdom, China, France and Spain, offering sufficient variance in the sample to explore ‘country-of-listing’ factors as discussed previously. The chosen timeframe is considered important as it encompasses an initial period of strong economic growth followed by the Global Financial Crisis and the European credit crisis, thus offering an opportunity to further validate the predictive power of the Core/Periphery of voluntary CSR disclosure and offering several important research opportunities: firstly it provides a longitudinal account of the voluntary CSR activities to be reported by the largest international banking companies; secondly, it provides an opportunity to study how common corporate governance crises impact the voluntary communication of CSR activities by the world’s largest banking corporations; thirdly it allows comparative analysis of the impacts of localised factors such as culture, politics, geographic and Stock exchange listing rules on official voluntary corporate CSR communications in a global context.

Research Opportunity

Andrew, Wickham, O’Donohue and Danzinger (2012) provide evidence from Australia indicating the existence of a Core/Periphery predictive model of CSR reporting, that is useful in predicting how companies will voluntarily disclose their CSR performance given the issues, events and/or crises that affect their industry environments.However, they note that ‘research should explore the rigour of the Core/Periphery model concept using a larger sample of companies and expanding the capture of data over a longer period of time’ to account for national and industry effects.

Research Question

The specific research question to be addressed in this research is: How do industry and national variable factors impact the voluntary disclosure of CSR activities by large multinational banking corporations?

Keywords

Corporate Social Responsibility, Core-Periphery Model of CSR, Business Ethics, Annual Reports, Finance, Voluntary Disclosure