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Full-Text Articles in Business

Attaining Legitimacy By Employee Information In Annual Reports, Pamela Kent, Tamara Zunker Jul 2014

Attaining Legitimacy By Employee Information In Annual Reports, Pamela Kent, Tamara Zunker

Pamela Kent

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to provide evidence on the category, quantity and quality of voluntary employee-related information Australian listed companies disclose in their annual report. An explanation is also sought to determine whether companies adopt employee-related disclosures to legitimise their relationship with society. Voluntary adoption of corporate governance best practice recommendations is used as a measure of companies’ attempts to attain ex ante legitimacy. Media agenda setting theory is used as a measure of an attempt to gain legitimacy ex post following adverse publicity from the media. Design/methodology/approach – The annual reports of all companies with …


Innate And Discretionary Accruals Quality And Corporate Governance, Pamela Kent, James Routledge, Jenny Stewart Jul 2010

Innate And Discretionary Accruals Quality And Corporate Governance, Pamela Kent, James Routledge, Jenny Stewart

Pamela Kent

This paper extends previous research on the association between corporate governance mechanisms and accruals quality. We derive measures of the discretionary and innate components of accruals quality and regress them against corporate governance characteristics. For discretionary accruals, we find use of a Big 4 audit firm and a larger audit committee as the primary governance mechanisms associated with higher accruals quality. For innate accruals quality, we find that higher quality is associated with an independent board of directors, a larger, more independent and more active audit committee, and use of a Big 4 audit firm. Our findings suggest a stronger …


Application Of Stakeholder Theory To Corporate Environmental Disclosures, Pamela Kent, Christopher Chan Jul 2010

Application Of Stakeholder Theory To Corporate Environmental Disclosures, Pamela Kent, Christopher Chan

Pamela Kent

Ullmann's (1985) three-dimensional model of social responsibility disclosure is tested to determine whether it can be operationalized to help explain the quantity and quality of environmental disclosures in Australian annual reports. The stakeholder power dimension of Ullmann's framework is significant in explaining environmental disclosures while content of the mission statement and existence or otherwise of environmental or social responsibility committees also find strong statistically significant support in the results. Ullmann's stakeholder theory has previously been applied to explain social disclosures in general (Roberts, 1992) and is an important theory because it introduces a measure of strategy. The current paper demonstrates …