Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand Conference 2022

Description

“Seeing is Believing?”: Visual Disclosure Analysis of Inaugural Modern Slavery Statements in Australia

This study investigates the use of impression management (IM) tactics via the usage visual presentation of pictures and photographs in Modern Slavery Statements (MSS). It employs visual content analysis to examine the extent and nature of MSS cover or title pages and the reporting MSS, their composition and depiction of pictures and photographs. Motivated by the enactment in Australia of the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) and using a sample of the inaugural mandatory reports submitted by 162 ASX 200 listed companies, the analysis uses impression management to explore how and why reporting entities use visual communication. The findings show that the majority of the reporting entities use pictures and photographs of people and places in their MSS where men photographs were dominated than women. Two-thirds of the total pictures and photographs were classified as ‘non-specific’ and no front covers could be categorised as directly modern slavery related, based on a disclosure index of 10 principles. Although it is not expected that reporting entities would directly address the subject of investigating and detecting such heinous practices, the frequency of the use of cover photographs and pictures convey an image of business as usual with a strong operational focus. The lack of ‘specific’ photographs and using IM tactics might constitute the practice of ‘bluewashing’. The research is an exploratory study which adds to the emergent research on modern slavery disclosures, as a subset of human rights and corporate social responsibility disclosure. It provides new evidence for modern slavery disclosure research by demonstrating that impression management theory explains the accounting for modern slavery when reporting entities respond to the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) reporting obligations. This is the first academic research paper to examine the extent of pictures and photographs of Australian entities after enactment the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth).

Period	Jun 2022
Event type	Conference
Location	Melbourne, Australia, VictoriaShow on map