Конфигурация совета директоров и раскрытие информации о корпоративной социальной отвественности: опыт развивающихся рынков

Nowadays, due to globalization processes, many countries faced with a necessity to overcome a lot of new issues: not only legal and economic, but also environmental and social. Such problems as overpopulation with overconsumption, deforestation and air pollution has been recently becoming more and more urgent. The pandemic situation started from spring 2020 also attracts attention of people to the problems which may occur any time and to understanding how much it is important to be able to operationalize country and business activity in the proper way in order to help citizens and customers feel safe. It is now common knowledge that all organizations should be involved in global problems solving and correct their strategies according to that. Lack of well-managed practices in the field of sustainable development undermines business models and jeopardizes companies’ finances and reputation.
At the same time, one can notice the upcoming trend of transparency in business: not only in relation to the companies’ shareholders, but also to its stakeholders, one of the most important out of which is the clients. Therefore, we may see that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) grows in its importance for the business. CSR includes a broad range of issues, such as working conditions, human rights, the environment, preventing corruption, gender equality, consumer interests and others. In order to be able to address them, a progressive internal environmental management system based on high standards should be implemented. The mechanism of CSR implementation allows companies to claim about their core activities, increase customer’s trust and loyalty and to increase dialogue between company and its stakeholders.
As far as CSR plays a vital role in a company’s strategy, this is directly related to the Corporate Governance (CG) which should implement striving towards transparency and balanced ratio of control and management. Supervision of the Board of Directors (BoD), therefore, plays a large role in the strategic development of the company. So, modern trends and the way how companies respond to the problems explain the relevance of this particular research work.
Coming closer to the scope of the research, the main investigation of this master thesis will be connected with the configuration of the Board of Directors (BoD) and its relation to the CSR disclosure processes and decisions related to that. The choice of this particular field of the research can be explained by the fact that CSR issues are becoming more and more urgent nowadays, and there is also an increasing influence of the BoD on the CSR of the company (Nelson, 2001). It is important that though there are a lot of studies investigating the characteristics of the board, there are almost no works, no matter what their authors’ origin is, which would study configuration of the BoD as a whole and its overall influence on the CSR disclosure. Therefore, this research is going to be new and relevant not only for the academic purposes, but also for real companies from
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all over the world, especially if certain common patterns will be revealed which, in its turn, can help businesses to understand how to organize its BoD in order to enhance CSR disclosure.
So, the research gap stems from the fact that for now there is a limited number of studies that analyze overall BoD configuration influencing CSR disclosure. There is one significant limitation as this research is focused and based on the data about Russian market, but the gap is wider because such investigations were not previously conducted on the international level. Moreover, experience from Russia can be very beneficial for other countries with emerging economies.
Research goal of this master thesis is to investigate the BoD configurations with their influence on CSR disclosure and reveal the BoD configurations that have the strongest influence on the CSR disclosure level.
Therefore, the research question is: How do the configurations of the BoD influence company’s disclosing CSR information?
In order to reach this goal, several objectives are to be achieved which are the following:
1. To investigate current situation on CSR disclosure in the emerging markets.
2. To reveal the theoretical background of interconnection between BoDs’ characteristics
and disclosure of CSR information.
3. To compare the influence of various BoDs’ characteristics combinations on the
disclosure of CSR information and reveal those of them that have the strongest
influence on the CSR disclosure level.
4. To come up with the recommendations about BoD configurations that lead to the
strengthening of CSR disclosure level in emerging markets, basing on the results
gathered.
The results of this work will enhance understanding of the relationship between the BoD
and CSR disclosure. From the point of view of the managerial implications, the corporate sector will be able to know relevant and up-to-date information on how to allocate board members in the most appropriate way.