Evidentiality Evaluation Method And Empirical Research For Corporate Social Responsibility Report

In recent years,more and more companies actively disclose social responsibility information and communicate with stakeholders while fulfilling their duties,to reduce corporate agency costs,maintain a good image,and increase corporate value.As a carrier of voluntary disclosure of information,social responsibility reports of enterprise have been increasingly concerned by society.However,unlike corporate financial information disclosure,social responsibility information disclosure is voluntary,selective,and low standardized:no quantitative rules,flexible contents and forms,more sets of words,less substantive contents,lack of practical cases and credibility.These have led to a lower level of social responsibility information and decision-making value.In addition,corporate social responsibility report is a tool for sending external signals,Impression management theory has also been brought into the research of corporate social responsibility information disclosure by a large number of scholars.Because the content of the text in the report far exceeds the data part,and the language flexibility space is large,many business managers will use the ambiguity of the text to intentionally utilize the impression management to influence the audience and achieve their intentions.Moreover,although there have been new ideas for the study of impression management in the identification of social responsibility reports,at present,it mainly stays on the report form,report readability,and semantic level,but does not really implement the content of the report.It is even more difficult to further explore the authenticity and reliability.Therefore,it becomes a problem for all stakeholders that how to effectively use social responsibility disclosure information and circumvent these opportunistic behaviors.According to the above points,to solve the problem of social responsibility information evaluation,this study starts from the perspective of impression management,based on the literature research,and adopts the in-depth interview and the grounded theory to conduct a qualitative study of report quality evaluation problem,then turns out a new dimension of evaluation.Afterwards,through the integration analysis,it establishes an evidentiality evaluation model which is suitable for the text of corporate social responsibility report.This model deeply explores the degree of Reasonable Evidence in the process of compiling report content,to recognize opportunistic behavior in information disclosure and reflect the authenticity and reliability.Based on the full sample(2009-2017)of social responsibility report issued by listed companies in China,test mining and reporting the overall situation and quantitative analysis of the changes in the actual scores,characteristics and outliers were carried out.The empirical statements of different industries,years and property rights were explored,and the empirical evaluation model was further reduced and classified,to study its characteristics on organizational level.The research finds that the evidentiality scores of social responsibility reports of public companies are generally distributed in a normal way.The differences in actual scores of different industries,years and property rights are more significant,mainly for the heterogeneity of industry and the regulation of external policies.From the substantive statement mode,the overall level of the evidentiality of the corporate social responsibility report of listed companies is still low,and the evidentiality information disclosed in the report is still insufficient.The distribution of different industries,years and property rights is consistent with the overall evidentiality statements of the report,only a few differences in the way of presentation patterns and the number.At the organizational level,the overall number of evidentiality of Organizational Behavior is greater than that of Organizational Behavior Performance of which quantitative information is less.Enterprises in the heavily polluting industries such as mining tend to disclose more quantitative information,while state-owned enterprises will disclose more evidentiality information than private enterprises.This paper mainly has the following innovations and contributions.First,this paper is an inquiry research,which is aimed at the existing methods of quality assessment of corporate social responsibility reports,such as subjective and lack of comparability.This paper provides a new evaluation dimension and establishes a unified standard of comparability,measurement,validity and reliability.Second,the research on information disclosure impression management is implemented at the level of report content,which breaks through the research on the readability,report form and semantic level of the main research reports in the past few studies,and deeply explores the authenticity of the content of corporate social responsibility report.Third,this thesis attempts to introduce the evidentiality in linguistics into the evaluation of corporate social responsibility report,and builds an empirical evaluation model based on this,enriching the connotation of evidentiality and broadening the dimension.Fourth,this study provides a set of quantifiable social responsibility report data,which can effectively conduct empirical research with real-life enterprise performance data and corporate governance data,and has a strong enlightening effect on subsequent research.