The institutionalisation of mining company sustainability disclosures

Abstract

This paper reports the analyses of the social and environmental disclosures of listed South African mining companies and compares the disclosures of larger companies with those of smaller companies using several different categories of comparison. The prior literature suggests that larger companies almost invariably disclose more social and environmental information due to their greater visibility. The expected differences are found in social disclosures, but not in environmental disclosures. An institutional theory framework explains these unexpected environmental disclosure findings. Specifically, normative isomorphism, usually driven by professionalization, becomes more prominent when a field reaches maturity and the field of corporate environmental disclosures among mining companies has reached a level of maturity and professionalization causing disclosures to be similar. These similarities have now reached the stage where small companies disclose the same amount of environmental information, in the same general format, as large companies.