Disclosure of Corporate Social Responsibility on the Websites of Portuguese Foundations

Introduction

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) presents an integrated vision of social and environmental concepts in companies' operations and interactions with their stakeholders in a voluntary manner (Dincer & Dincer, 2010). CSR will be analyzed in this study by disseminating the quantity and typology of information disclosure on the websites of Portuguese foundations.

The literature on the analysis of CSR has been carried out predominantly through studies based mainly on companies, as are the cases of studies of Chaudhri & Wang (2007), Dincer & Dincer (2010), and Branco et al. (2014). However, more recent studies (e.g. Gálvez-Rodríguez et al., 2012, 2014; Tremblay-Boire & Prakash, 2014) have already studied this subject through non-profit organizations, more precisely through non-governmental organizations. We intend to contribute empirically by using another type of non-profit organizations, specifically foundations, which we do not believe to have been the subject of studies by the scientific community, and which may provide different results on the commitment of this type of organizations in the dissemination of the quantity and quality of CSR disclosure.

The analysis of the disclosure tool itself also gains preponderance in this study. The fact that CSR dissemination analysis has evolved mainly through studies based on annual reports, raises the importance of analyzing the dissemination of other types of dissemination tools (Fifka, 2012). Therefore, we intend to study the dissemination of CSR through the Internet, another usual tool in the exposure of information in the context of social responsibility (e.g. Chapple & Moon, 2005; Chaudhri & Wang, 2007; Chen & Bouvain, 2009; Silva, 2015). For example, Silva (2015) says that it is relevant to study the use of Internet, in this study represented by the websites, to communicate the information related to CSR, as consumer awareness and the competitive environment exerts a certain amount of pressure to the benefit of the society in which they are placed so that the entities disclose CSR practices. In fact, non-profit organizations are strategically using their own personal website to present themselves to the public and share information (Lee & Blouin, 2017).

This study will be used as a methodology similar to those adopted in the studies of Chaudhri & Wang (2007), Dincer & Dincer (2010), and Branco et al. (2014) This will allow the comparison between studies that analyzed the dissemination of CSR in different temporal spaces, types of organizations and cultural contexts. With the purpose of supporting the analysis of the CSR theme between our study and the others, this study has as a theoretical support the theory of legitimacy and the theory of stakeholders, two theories connected to the corporate disclosure of information on social affairs.

In the next section we review the concept, objectives and tools of disclosure of CSR, as well as the underlying theories chosen to explain their dissemination, more specifically the theory of stakeholders and the theory of legitimacy. In the third section, we present the research methodology, including the definition of the study sample, the process of data collection and analysis. In the fourth section, the results are presented and discussed. Contributions, limitations and perspectives of future research are in the final section.