Corporate social reporting: segmentation and characterization of Spanish companies

Abstract This study establishes a new methodology in the analysis of the corporate social information disclosed by companies, since the objective pursued does not concentrate on showing the amount of information issued by each one of the companies individually, but rather on grouping them, taking into consideration their similarity in content and in the characteristics of the information revealed. Afterwards, those characteristics were identified that define or help determine membership in each segment or informative group. This shows that the similarity in the content and the characteristics of the information revealed is positively associated with larger‐sized companies that belong to certain sectors of business activity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.