Description
Corporate Reporting: Cover Art as Impression Management in Modern Slavery StatementsThis study investigates the use of impression management (IM) tactics via 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, 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 reporting entities use pictures and photographs of people and places on the cover or title page of the MSS, or else use geometric or abstract patterns and colour. No 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 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.
| Period | May 2022 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 32nd |
| Location | St Andrews, United KingdomShow on map |