Dolphin deaths, organizational legitimacy and potential employees’ reactions to assured environmental disclosures

The present study draws from and extends experimental design frameworks used by Chan and Milne (1999) and Milne and Patten (2002). It extends this work using external negative news media contrasted with (positive) corporate environmental report disclosures, by focusing on respondents’ potential employment decisions and their perceptions of organizational reputation/legitimacy, and by examining the impact of assurance in these relationships. In addition, the study probes the veracity of business claims that disclosures and their assurance can build a business case for stakeholder communication. These are set and examined within a context of commercial fishing practices and the consequent deaths of rare dolphins.The study finds mixed evidence that independent assurance of corporate environmental disclosures increases the credibility of corporate environmental information to users in the context of this decision experiment. A number of highly significant relationships are observed between the revealed decision positions of the respondents and their reaction to corporate environmental information and negative newspaper reports, and not all of these are subject to influence by the presence of an assurance statement.