A longitudinal study of corporate social reporting in Singapore

This paper presents a longitudinal study of corporate social disclosures by publicly‐listed Singapore‐based companies in the banking, food and beverages, and hotel industries from 1986 to 1995. Annual reports of all the 33 companies in the three industries were examined and it was found that 16 of them did not have any social responsibility disclosures throughout the ten‐year period. Sentence‐by‐sentence content analysis of the annual reports of the remaining 17 companies was then conducted. The companies mainly disclosed information on human resources and community involvement. Starting from a low level, there was a steady increase in the amount of social information presented in annual reports during the late 1980s. The amount of disclosures, however, has remained steady since 1993. The two tobacco companies in the sample did have significantly larger amounts of social information disclosed. This last result supports the arguments of legitimacy theory.