Corporate Social Responsibility and Accounting in Poland: A Literature Review

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a popular research stream across scientific disciplines as indicated by the number of publications increasing world-wide. At the same time, this is a very much country-specific notion. In Poland, as in other CEE countries, the development of CSR has been influenced by the communist past and the economic situation. The paper presents an overview of Polish literature on CSR and accounting themes. Our findings result from quantitative (2000-2015) and longitudinal qualitative (1984-2016) analyses of Polish publications. An analysis of the content of BazEkon and EBSCO databases, as well as the search performed using the Google Scholar have demonstrated a growing interest of Polish academia in CSR issues since 2001. However, a significant increase in the number of publications on the topic has been observed only since 2005. In order to present the key debates in the area of CSR disclosures, we have analyzed 67 papers. We discovered that most papers published by Polish researchers concentrated on the content of CSR reports and on the integrated reporting concept. The most frequently used methods were literature review and content analysis. Only a few researchers applied statistical tools or conducted interviews or surveys. The interests of Polish researchers in the area of CSR reporting focus on factors influencing CSR reporting and the quality of CSR reports. Because CSR and reporting on CSR are in the early stages of development in Poland, it would be valuable to repeat the performed literature analysis in a few years’ time. It can be expected that the CSR concept will gain in popularity and more research sources (like CSR or integrated reports) will be available to Polish academics, which will be reflected in the topics of their studies and the methods used.