The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in Controversial Industries
Open accessAbstract
We examine the sustainability reporting activities of companies in controversial industries, e.g., alcohol, firearms, for-profit prisons, gambling, tobacco, marijuana and payday loans. For each industry we identify its controversial social problem – the “elephant in the room.” We then examine whether the company issued a sustainability report in the last three years and, if so, how the report dealt with the firm’s controversial social issue. Compared to two non-controverisal sectors – grocery stores and department/discount stores – companies in controversial industries publish sustainability or CSR-type reports at a lower rate (28% versus 43%). We also find significant differences in how the two groups of companies allocate space in their CSR reports. We categorize pages in the reports as dedicated to social and community efforts or environmental issues. The non-controversial companies devote significantly more of their reports to environmental issues than do controversial companies. The controversial companies have a higher ratio of their reports dedicated to social and community activities relative to environmental activities. This result is consistent with firms in controversial industries using social and community actions to attain legitimacy by taking actions that offset the social ills inherent in their core business. It also suggests that these companies believe that doing good in one arena substitutes for harm done elsewhere, This notion of offsetting harm with good…
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 16
- M Bossle, 2015, Contradictory perceptions on corporate social responsibility practices in the Brazilian tobacco industry, Latin American Journal of Management for Sustainable Development, 2, 193, 10.1504/lajmsd.2015.073060 · DOI · Paper page
- Y Cai, 2011, Doing well while doing bad? CSR in controversial industry sectors, Journal of Business Ethics, 108, 467, 10.1007/s10551-011-1103-7 · DOI
- C Deegan, 2011, Financial Accounting Theory, 2 nd ed
- G Demuijnck, 2016, The social license to operate, Journal of Business Ethics, 136, 675, 10.1007/s10551-015-2976-7 · DOI
- P J Dimaggio, 1983, The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields, American Sociological Review, 48, 147, 10.2307/2095101 · DOI · Paper page
- D W Greening, 1994, Testing a model of organizational response to social and political issues, Academy of Management Journal, 37, 467, 10.2307/256697 · DOI
- R C Hybels, 1995, On legitimacy, legitimation, and organizations: a critical review and integrative theoretical model, Academy of Management Journal, Special Issue: Best Papers Proceedings, 241, 10.5465/ambpp.1995.17536509 · DOI
- H Jo, 2012, Does CSR reduce firm risk? Evidence from controversial industry sectors, Journal of Business Ethics, 110, 441, 10.1007/s10551-012-1492-2 · DOI
- T Kilian, 2014, Corporate social responsibility and environmental reporting in controversial industries, European Business Review, 26, 79, 10.1108/ebr-04-2013-0080 · DOI
- M Kotchen, 2012, Corporate social responsibility for irresponsibility. The B.E, Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 10.1515/1935-1682.3308 · DOI
- G O'donovan, 2002, Environmental disclosures in the annual report: Extending the applicability and predictive power of legitimacy theory, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 15, 344, 10.1108/09513570210435870 · DOI
- A Omran, 2015, Theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility disclosure: a critical review, International Journal of Accounting and Financial Reporting, 5, 38, 10.5296/ijafr.v5i2.8035 · DOI
- J Reast, 2012, Legitimacy-seeking organizational strategies in controversial industries: a case study analysis and a bi-dimensional model, Journal of Business Ethics, 118, 139, 10.1007/s10551-012-1571-4 · DOI
- W R Scott, 1983, The organization of societal sectors, Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality, 129
- M C Suchman, 1995, Managing legitimacy: strategic and institutional approaches, Academy of Management Journal, 20, 571, 10.5465/amr.1995.9508080331 · DOI · Paper page
- M Yani-De-Soriano, 2012, Can an industry be socially responsible if its products harm consumers? The case of online gambling, Journal of Business Ethics, 110, 481, 10.1007/s10551-012-1495-z · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Mandatory CSR and sustainability reporting: economic analysis and literature review
Christensen, H. B., Hail, L., & Leuz, C. (2021) · Review of Accounting Studies · doi:10.1007/s11142-021-09609-5 · Cited by 1,923
“For instance, Byrd et al. (2016) find that alcohol, tobacco, and firearm firms disclose more on social and community actions than firms in noncontroversial industries. The authors argue that these disclosures help firms legitimize their operations and convey to the public that they take actions to offset the perceived…”
BackgroundInfluential
Metadata
- Authors
- Byrd, J. W., Hickman, K., Baker, C. R., & Cohanier, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Colorado Denver (US)
- Gonzaga University (US)
- Adelphi University (US)
- EADA Business School (ES)
- Corresponding author
- Byrd, John W.
- Venue
- SSRN Electronic Journal
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2017
- ISSN
- 1556-5068 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W6885049320
- Cited by
- 35
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 3
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Accounting › Accounting and Financial Management
- Keywords
- corporate social responsibility disclosure, controversial industries
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in Controversial Industries. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2139/ssrn.2894789
- The paper
- Byrd, J. W., Hickman, K., Baker, C. R., & Cohanier, B. (2017). Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in Controversial Industries. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2894789
