Stakeholders Engagement and Readability of Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting : A Study of Most Sustainable Firms

The social and environmental responsibility of business has become a major issue in recent years and communicating messages about such initiatives are likely to evoke strong and often positive reactions among stakeholders of every firm. Companies can generate favorable attitudes among their stakeholders by engaging them in CSR activities and eventually strengthen stakeholder-company relationships. As a result, there is a need for companies to communicate their CSR activities more effectively to stakeholders using different media. This paper considers the content of one type of such communications, the CSR report. Trough a content analysis, it looks at how five of top sustainable organizations address their stakeholders in their CSR reports. The readability of such reports for stakeholders will also be evaluated. The results suggest that only a selected number of stakeholders are addressed in the studied CSR reports and these reports found to be not readable enough for the intended audience.Godkänd; 2015; 20160330 (arakor