Social and Environmental Accounting as Symbolic and Substantive Means of Legitimation: The Case of HIV/AIDS Reporting in South Africa

Soobaroyen, T. and Ntim, C. (2013) Social and Environmental Accounting as Symbolic and Substantive Means of Legitimation: The Case of HIV/AIDS Reporting in South Africa. Accounting Forum, 37(2), pp. 92-109. (doi: 10.1016/j.accfor.2013.04.002)

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Abstract

We develop an interpretive framework which combines Suchman's (1995) work on the dynamics of organisational legitimacy and Ashforth and Gibbs’ (1990) concepts of symbolic and substantive management to investigate how and why public corporations rely on symbolic and substantive social disclosures. We apply this framework to the case of the HIV/AIDS health crisis in South Africa (SA) and examine the corporate disclosure behaviour of a sample of 75 SA-listed corporations from 2003 to 2009. We use content analysis procedures to codify the disclosures and devise a disclosure index based on the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines on HIV/AIDS to assess whether corporations have adopted a substantive management strategy. Our findings suggest that public corporations use a combination of substantive and symbolic disclosures in a bid to seek specific forms of moral legitimacy (structural, procedural, and consequential) and pragmatic legitimacy (dispositional, influence, and exchange). Our analysis reveals that the mix of substantive and symbolic disclosures is altered as a result of changes in stakeholder salience, societal attitudes and the corporation's current ‘state’ of legitimacy. Overall, the findings demonstrate that our analytical framework is useful in understanding how substantive and/or symbolic disclosures could be relied upon to achieve specific types of organisational legitimacy.

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Ntim, Professor Collins
Authors: Soobaroyen, T., and Ntim, C.
College/School:College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Accounting and Finance
Journal Name:Accounting Forum
Publisher:Elsevier Ltd
ISSN:1467-6303
Published Online:01 June 2013

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