Disclosures of corporate social responsibility in colombia, chile, mexico and peru: a view from the institutional theory.

Civil society has called for greater committed firms on issues such as sustainable economy, environmental care and fear work conditions over the last two decades. Because of the importance that firms have taken in society those issues just mentioned are not just anymore responsibilities of the state and governments. as a result, firms are moving towards the inclusion of social wealth fare into their corporate functions (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2002). Incidentally, sustainability issues in all its forms require transparency of information, which arises as social imperative for firms as well. The issue of transparency of information, which is the main debate of this thesis; it is influenced by the institutional environment in which such firms are involved. It defines the context in which firms and stakeholders (players) act. So, firms use information to legitimize its actions under the established institutional conditions. Given this, and taking into account that institutions determinate to some extent any form of legitimation this research seeks to characterize the information that firms disclosed about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). To understand differences in institutional environments the thesis considers a population of firms from four different countries.In order to give meaning to this information this thesis proposes the development of two indexes. (1) an aggregated index was built to measure the institutional conditions in each of the selected countries. (2) The second index measures the extent of disclose of information on social responsibility. The compiling analysis uses a multivariate statistics analysis (MSa) to identify the link between these two indexes. Some preliminary conclusions suggest (1) homogeneity in the institutional characteristics of the selected countries in the study. The evidence also (2) indicates similarities in the way in which firms give the information on social responsibility. Finally, the analysis depicts some degree of interaction between the two indexes (Institutional condition index and disclosure of information index).