Environmental reporting on the internet by America's Toxic 100: Legitimacy and self-presentation

This study uses Goffman's self-presentation theory to examine corporate website environmental disclosures from an organizational legitimacy perspective. We argue that corporations use Internet reporting and website platforms to project a more socially acceptable environmental management approach to public stakeholders. We argue further that this disclosure activity is often de-coupled from their actual environmental performance. To test these conjectures, we refine and employ a comprehensive disclosure evaluation metric to assess both the content and the presentation of these types of disclosures and utilize a firm's America's Toxic 100 toxic score, a newly developed measure based on the US Environmental Protection Agency's toxics release inventory (TRI) data, to proxy for environmental performance. Based on empirical tests of four size-matched samples, our findings support our conjectures, showing that worse environmental performers provide more extensive disclosure in terms of content and website presentation.