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Abstract
Corporations are only responsible in three areas: laws and regulations, voluntary codes and salient stakeholder demands. This thesis concentrates on the third aspect. Salient stakeholders, such as powerful NGOs, can effectively undermine corporate reputation and mobilize the public in protest when corporations egregiously violate social mores, ultimately impeding corporate pursuit of profit-maximization. In this way, social mores are converted into financial signals forcing corporations to account for social costs. For this to be effective, however, requires corporate transparency.
Social accountability, defined as “a systematic attempt to identify, measure, monitor, and evaluate an organization's performance with respect to its social efforts, goals, and programs”, is still in its nascent stages.
Using Talisman Energy's Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2000: Sudan Operations as a case study, it is demonstrated that the current financial accounting methodology is ineffective at promoting greater corporate transparency. Instead, current approaches serve only to legitimate existing performance.
In response to these criticisms, an alternative to the financial accounting approach is recommended: the judicial model of inquiry. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
