Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in Malaysia

Abstract

There is a conventional wisdom in business that companies can ill afford to be socially responsible. It is believed that such behaviour incurs costs with no corresponding financial return and that, therefore, to maximise profit and optimise shareholder value companies are best advised to just get on with the task of making money, legally, and pay little attention to wider social responsibility. There is evidence that this conventional wisdom is being turned on its head and that companies will benefit not only from being socially responsible but also from being able to demonstrate convincingly that they are socially responsible through communicating to stakeholders their commitment to, and record on, corporate social responsibility (CSR). A number of North American and Northern European companies have recognised this and accordingly engage in corporate social responsibility reporting (CSSR). In this paper the authors assess the state of CSSR in Malaysia. They do so by scrutinising, using content analysis, the social and environmental disclosures found in the annual reports of Malaysia's 250 largest companies. They go on to investigate further one aspect of CSSR: namely, corporate environmental reporting (CER). The results reveal that CSRR in general and CER in particular are in their infancy in Malaysia. The authors go on to discuss reasons for the apparent low level of CER, making reference to the lack of government and public pressure, lack of perceived benefits and the widely held view that companies do not significantly impact on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]