The Research Of Legitimacy Pressure On Heavily Polluting Enterprises To The Level Of Environmental Information Disclosure

With the introduction of a series of environmental laws and regulations,the public environmental awareness is gradually improving,and they pay more attention to the corporate’s environmental information disclosure.Organizational legitimacy theory can effectively account for the motivation of enterprises disclose environmental information.Researches based on organizational legitimacy perspective on corporate environmental information disclosure,western scholars have made some progress,but there is a gap in China compared with Western countries with the depth and breadth.With the government,the media and the public’s attention,companies need to deal with the legality pressure and to consolidate legitimacy of its own,it must be disclosed to the pollution control measures and management processes or other environmental information.Heavy polluting enterprises are the primary duty bearers of environmental pollution,more attention should be paid to environmental information disclosure.Government supervision,the degree of media attention and public awareness of environmental protection will bring them a lot of legitimacy pressure.Well,how will this series of legitimacy pressure influence the enterprises’ environmental protection disclosure?In this paper,the author will analysis the relationship between the legitimacy pressure and enterprises’ environmental protection disclosure based on the organizational legitimacy theory,and will make suggestions.This paper reviews the relevant literature and research about the relationship between organizations legitimacy and environmental information disclosure,grasp the current research and developments.Then this paper introduce the organizational legitimacy theory and other theories related to the environmental information disclosure,pointing out that enterprises can obtain and maintain legitimacy by revealing environmental information.Then the author analysis the influence mechanism about regulation legality pressure,specification legality pressure,cognitive legality pressure and environmental information disclosure.On this basis,we make relevant assumptions about three kinds of legality pressure influence the corporate environmental information disclosure level.This paper selects 2012-2014 Shanghai A-shares heavily polluting industries 238 listed companies a total of 714 research samples,manual scoring their environmental information disclosed in the annual report,to determine its environmental disclosure index.Then the author analysis the proxy variable on legality pressure,and establish the multivariate linear regression model between legality pressure and corporate environmental disclosure index,through descriptive statistical analysis,correlation analysis and multiple linear regression analysis,get the conclusions of this paper.The research shows that heavy polluting enterprises’ environmental information disclosure level is increasing every year,it can illustrate that corporate environmental awareness is growing.But the overall level of disclosure is still not high enough,there is much room for improvement.The empirical study shows that the legality pressure can improve the enterprises’ environmental information disclosure level:government regulation may encourage enterprises to disclose more environmental information as a major source of regulation legality pressure;media attention has a positive effect to improve corporate environmental information disclosure level as an important specification legality pressure;the larger the enterprise,the higher attention from public,the greater of the cognitive legitimacy pressure,the enterprise also tend to disclose more environmental information.Finally,through the analysis of the conclusions of this paper,the author put forward relevant suggestions:(1)improve the relevant environmental legal system,give full play to the supervision and management functions of government;(2)to strengthen media oversight function,exert correctly guiding public opinion role of the media;(3)improve the public demand for environmental information,and improving enterprises’ environmental awareness.