The Impact of National Contextual Factors on Corporate Social and Environmental Disclosure (CSED): The Perceptions of Jordanian Stakeholders

This paper reviews the corporate external contextual factors affecting the practices of CSED from the perspectives of internal and external Jordanian stakeholders. Specifically, this paper aims at exploring the views and perceptions of both internal and external Jordanian stakeholders about the importance of the historical, political, economic, socio-cultural, and non-institutional factors in motivating production of CSED information by Jordanian companies. By using semi-structured interviews; extracted information from multiple groups of Jordanian stakeholders was divided into four main themes. Thus, in order to add valuable and understandable information to the thematic analysis, interpretive paradigm is adopted as are search methodology to generate and analyse knowledge existing in the interviewees' minds. The overall findings for such analysis indicated that the political conditions, legal system, cultural values and economic development are all significant factors in explaining the level of CSER disclosure in the context of Jordan. The findings also emphasized that cultural factor seems to have the greatest impact on the corporate disclosure practices. As such, it can be concluded from this paper that Jordanian stakeholders regard local contextual factors as important fundamental determinants of CSER disclosures.