7. Conclusion
The findings of this study open the new door for discussion and it can be questioned whether pronouncement of a code may promote the interest of all the stakeholders. This is because some firms may comply with corporate governance practices and may not care about social and environmental wrongdoings unless there will be an imminent pressure from an element of corporate governance practices. Thus, the practitioner/policy implication of this study is that regulators should gradually consider more onerous CSR regulations to ensure more responsible firm operations.
This study may be subject to some limitations. First, the data were mainly collected from company annual reports. Because the accounting standards are very poor in developing countries, annual reports may not truly represent a company’s true state of affairs and performance (Deegan, 2006). Second, the data were collected from a large number of observations of different corporate entities, ignoring the underlying differences in organisations, for in no way are two organisations (even in the same industry) the same (Deegan, 2006). Third, this study was purposefully confined to the disclosure attributes within designated areas, and many other attributes, such as disability policies and pay awards, were ignored. Fourth, this study used the content analysis method, which requires objectivity and the specification of variables such that an item may be judged consistently as falling or not falling into a particular category (Guthrie and Mathews, 1985); it is thus heavily reliant on the judgement and integrity of the coder or researcher (Rashid, 2013b). Although the study’s integrity is beyond question and a high level of caution was maintained during the coding process, a major limitation of this study is the subjectivity or judgement associated with the coding process, which may influence the results.
