Communicating corporate responsibility through corporate web sites in Spain

The main objective of this study is to examine the presence and organization of information on corporate responsibility that is on the corporate web sites of companies that belong to the index of the Spanish stock market.

The authors have designed a specific tool to identify corporate responsibility issues and to analyse how information on such issues is organized and presented on corporate web sites. A content analysis methodology was applied to the web sites of the companies under study.

The results suggest that the companies that were studied assign great importance to corporate responsibility on their web sites, even though they disseminate on those sites a limited conception of what corporate responsibility is and focus mainly on the topics of social and environmental action. Another relevant finding is the highly dispersed nature of the information that is related to corporate responsibility on corporate web sites.

The study was conducted on a sample of companies from the Spanish stock market, and therefore the results are not necessarily representative of the entire Spanish stock market or of companies that do not trade on it.

This paper offers a specific methodology for the analysis of information on corporate responsibility and the organization of that information on the corporate web sites of all types of companies. The methodology and the results may be of utility to other researchers and will facilitate international comparisons of organizations regarding corporate responsibility and the manner in which information on this topic is disseminated to various stakeholders.