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Accounting Theory and Practice Essay

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1. Introduction

Recent years have saw that listed firms, especially the large organisations, voluntarily disclose their Social and Environmental issues in their annual reports. As a result, a question was come up with by researchers: why managers would choose to undertake the voluntary activities?

Although there is no consensus being reached about what perspective theories should be used to explain the Social and Environmental Accounting, and moreover critique voices are from the works of Marx or by the deep-green or feminist literatures (Deegan, 2002), to some extent, systems-oriented theory and Positive Accounting Theory can list some hints.

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“The reputation risk management perspective on voluntary social and environmental disclosures in annual reports assumes that threats to corporate legitimacy can result in damage to the value of a company’s reputation, and such risks to reputation need to be minimized through active management.” (Deegan & Unerman, 2006)

As said by Jonathan Symonds, the Chief Financial Officer of AstraZeneca’s Risk Advisory Group, Failure to deliver our core value could seriously impact out reputation. While the core value is something like social responsibility, environmental policy, and so on, it is those that company should communicate with the public to protect their reputation as legitimate.

For example, after the Brent Spar oil rig dumping, Royal Dutch/Shell voluntarily prepared reports about its people and profits in order to repair its image for its failure to deal with the execution by the Nigerian government of an anti-Shell activist (Livesey & Kearins, 2002).

3. Stakeholder theory

As both legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory belong to “political economy theory”, they have some overlaps (Gray, Kouhy, and Lavers, 1995). However, compared with legitimacy theory, which mainly discusses the social expectation, stakeholder theory presents a closer view with particular groups in society. That is, legitimacy theory concern about the

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