Readability of Corporate Social Responsibility communication in Malaysia

Abstract This study examines the readability of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication (disclosure) for a sample of listed companies in Malaysia. The study employs Readability Formulae and finds that the extent of syntactic complexity making it difficult to comprehend the CSR communication of the listed companies varies from very difficult to fairly difficult. There is a relationship between the readability of the CSR communication and companies' performance. Our findings imply that management of poorly performing companies deliberately choose difficult language in CSR communication which supports the obfuscation hypothesis. Our study contributes significantly to research in CSR literature by enumerating the syntactical difficulties in the corporate annual CSR communications. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.