Details of Research Outputs

The overall aims of this study are to investigate the factors that motivate oil companies to disclose their HSE and sustainability performance, the stakeholder groups engaging in disclosure, the HSE or corporate sustainability themes and topics that are disclosed in the main content of relevant annual reports, and the trends that can be observed in the existent CSR disclosure practices. Content analysis is used in this comparative study to investigate the HSE and sustainability annual reports publicly issued by two state-owned oil companies from different countries—SINOPEC from the oil-importing People’s Republic of China and ADNOC from the oil-exporting United Arab Emirates. This study reaches a general conclusion that both oil companies have been establishing their legitimacy and social reputation by evolving their CSR disclosure from limited HSE information to full-length sustainability reports. Our conclusions can be elaborated in four respects: 1) legitimacy theory explains well the motivation for the oil companies to continuously improving their CSR disclosure,; 2) certain key stakeholder groups engaged in the CSR disclosure are identified to develop a resource-based framework for stakeholder analysis; 3) the inclusion of ecological metrics has made the CSR disclosure more informational; and 4) the longitudinal content analysis on the two oil companies’ CSR disclosure presents a trend that sustainability information disclosure is developing into a special social accounting system with increasing formalization, standardization, systematization, and quantification.