Social Movements and Corporate Social Disclosure: Evidence from Jordan

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the extent, trends, and practices of employee and community disclosure, important but yet largely ignored areas of CSR disclosure, in the context of emerging countries. The study also examined the impact of social movements on employee and community disclosure. The current study provides a fresh perspective by bridging the gap between prior literature at the nexus of social movement and organisation analysis and prior literature on employee and community disclosure. The Arab Spring, employees’ strikes, and local communities’ protests were used as proxies to study social movements. Data on employee and community disclosure was collected from the annual reports of 50 Jordanian companies over the period from 2008 to 2015. The data was collected using a content analysis and two disclosure indexes developed, based on the GRI 2013 guidelines. The findings are in line with the theoretical underpinning of the current study and prior literature. Precisely, the weak engagement by the Jordanian companies with employee disclosure and the role of socio-political factors in shaping such disclosure practices has been evidenced in this study. Moreover, employee and community disclosures are found to increase significantly in response to changes in social pressures and social expectations after the democratic movement of the Arab Spring, and in response to employees’ strikes and community protests. The findings also shed some light on the role of media attention, SMOs, and poverty level in moderating the impact of a social movement and stakeholders’ activism on both employee and community disclosures. Along with other implications, this study highlights the importance of the integration between the social movement perspective into organisational analysis to understand the role of social movement as a determinant of employee and community disclosure.