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Introduction
Keywords Social accounting, Environmental audit, Motivation
Abstract This paper serves as an introduction to this special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal; an issue which embraces themes associated with social and environmental reporting (SAR) and its role in maintaining or creating organisational legitimacy. In an effort to place this research in context the paper begins by making reference to contemporary trends occurring in social and environmental accounting research generally, and this is then followed by an overview of some of the many research questions which are currently being addressed in the area. Understanding motivations for disclosure is shown to be one of the issues attracting considerable research attention, and the desire to legitimise an organisation's operations is in turn shown to be one of the many possible motivations. The role of legitimacy theory in explaining managers' decisions is then discussed and it is emphasised that legitimacy theory, as it is currently used, must still be considered to be a relatively under-developed theory of managerial behaviour. Nevertheless, it is argued that the theory provides useful insights. Finally, the paper indicates how the other papers in this issue of AAAJ contribute to the ongoing development of legitimacy theory in SAR research.
1. Introduction
This article has been written to provide an overview of a particular theoretical perspective that has been used to explain why managers might elect to publicly disclose information about particular aspects of their social or environmental performance[1]. This article also provides an introduction to the other articles in this special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, and it does this by indicating where the authors' research "resides" within the broader body of literature which has typically been labelled as social and environmental accounting research (SEAR). It will be shown that the four other papers in this special issue of AAAJ embrace a sub-set of the total research effort, this "sub-set" being research which explores the motivations behind corporate social and environmental reporting. As will be indicated, there is a deal of research that provides evidence that corporate social and environmental reporting is motivated by a desire, by management, to legitimise various aspects of their respective organisations. This might be a valued strategy for an organisation when particular events...