Research Into Aluminum Industry Listed Companies’ CSR Report Disclosure Under The Pressure Of Institutional Isomorphism

With the development of society,the number of CSR reports in China has been increasing during these years,among which the number of voluntary reports has already exceeded the number of mandatory reports in 2018.However,the quality didn’t improve relatively while the quantity was surging.It is well known that disclosure of CSR reports need resources.So why does the company choose to disclose voluntarily when it is not necessary for them.And why they skimps their work when they choose to disclose voluntarily? This paper believes that the "isomorphism theory" can explain this phenomenon.According to this theory,the company will do inefficient things when they are under the institutional isomorphism pressure,the behavior of CSR reports disclosure can be as an example.Therefore,this paper will demonstrate how the institutional isomorphism pressure can affect company’s behavior and lead to phenomenon mentioned above by using the isomorphism theory.Nanshan Aluminum,a typical example in the aluminum industry,is selected as an analysis case in this paper,so as to better understand company’s motivation behind this phenomenon.Case study supported by authoritative data such as RKS shows that(1)There is a mismatch of quantity growth and quality improvement in China’s CSR report disclosure under the influence of institutional isomorphism pressure.Although this pressure has a certain positive effect on the development of CSR reports disclosure in China,it is mainly reflected in the quantity rather than the quality.(2)The aluminum industry’s willingness to disclose CSR reports is relatively low,but under the institutional isomorphism pressure,company started to disclose perfunctorily.Take Nanshan aluminum as an example,there is no efficiency disclosure motives if we view it from the company attribute,but the institutional isomorphism pressure has led to the non-efficiency motivation to make it follow the same strategy as others to voluntarily disclose the social responsibility report to avoid being incompatible with others.(3)Since the law does not require that the social responsibility report must be reviewed,and the compilation basis is not unified,it leaves room for company to manipulate their reports.In addition,under the pressure of legality and uncertainty,company are prone to imitate each other.However,company who imitates other to disclose perfunctory report can already reach the average level,so as to better relieve institutional isomorphism pressure.Therefore,they choose to imitate the average rather than the best.Hence,mutual imitation will make it difficult to improve the quality of social responsibility information disclosure in aluminum industry with poor disclosure quality for a long time.Finally,based on the above findings,this paper believes that the quality of China’s CSR report can be improved mainly from the perspective of enhancing company’s efficiency motivation and non-efficiency motivation.On the one hand,this paper enriches the theoretical research in the field of social responsibility information disclosure by using the institutional isomorphism theory;On the other hand,by putting forward suggestions,this paper may help improve the quality of CSR reports and promote the fulfillment of CSR,so as to alleviate the conflicts among stakeholders.