title: Corporate environmental transparency in China

authors: Cai, Wei

subjects: Corporate Environmental Transparency (CET)

abstract: The intensification of the environmental crisis has led stakeholders to pay increasing attention to corporate environmental transparency (CET). One obvious manifestation of this interest is that they require companies to present openness and disclose various information related to the environment. As an influential stakeholder group, policy-makers have also attached greater significance to the adoption of environmental policies based on information disclosure. For example, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), whose objective is to develop global sustainability disclosure standards, was established at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). In policy-making practice, transparency is often advocated as a prerequisite for legitimacy, policy efficiency, and good governance.
The direction of accounting research is often inextricably linked to changes in the field of practice. In recent years, the concept of transparency has attracted extensive attention among accounting scholars. However, current research tends to use corporate environmental disclosure as a measure of corporate transparency. In the context of the general absence of environmental disclosure regulation, and therefore of standardised (and comparable) disclosures, this trend is highly controversial. Some scholars have critically commented that in addition to corporate environmental disclosure, there are other channels, such as government websites, media news reports, etc., through which to make corporate environmental information transparent to the public.
As the country with the world’s highest share of carbon emissions, China is determined to accelerate various reform measures to achieve the carbon neutrality it has committed to reaching by 2060. Since 2017, China has implemented a mandatory environmental disclosure policy to promote the environmental transparency of listed companies and in so doing provides a promising policy environment and comparable standards for conducting CET research. Therefore, as a response to the academic call for more studies on the complex concept of transparency in the environmental accounting field, this thesis focuses particularly on the concept of CET and its related practices in the Chinese context.
The objective of this thesis is to develop a measure of CET and to apply that measure to assess both the environmental transparency of listed companies in China and the impact environmental transparency has on corporate financial performance. Furthermore, the thesis also aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the internal and external driving forces behind CET. To achieve this goal, the thesis set five specific research objectives and asked five research questions. Meeting these objectives and answering these questions involved both finding empirical results (such as correlations) and searching for explanations to gain a deeper understanding of causal mechanisms.
Driven by its research objectives and questions, this thesis follows a pragmatism philosophical stance. This paradigm can reconcile the contradiction between research objectives which stems from the long-standing subjective and objective debate between positivism and constructivism. In addition, pragmatism is regarded as providing philosophical and theoretical elements of mixed methods research design that lend mixed research argumentative coherence and validity. Therefore, a mixed research design is chosen for this thesis because the application of both quantitative and qualitative research methods contributes to a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the subject (i.e., CET) of the thesis. 
Guided by the mixed methods research design, this thesis consists of quantitative and qualitative investigations. There are two main findings in the quantitative investigation. First, the environmental transparency of Chinese listed companies does not meet the expectations of policy-makers. This finding is based on the assessment of CET in the Chinese context. Specifically, the mandatory environmental disclosure policy is not well followed; listed companies are suspected of concealing information about significant environmental administrative penalties, and there is a strong sense of mistrust among stakeholder groups towards corporate environmental disclosure, etc. Second, a significant negative correlation between CET and corporate financial performance was obtained through regression analysis on the sample companies. That finding shows that in the short term greater environmental transparency means higher environmental resource allocation, which in turn affects resource inputs in the production process and consequently has a negative impact on profits.
In addition, the qualitative investigation identifies the internal and external driving factors behind CET in the Chinese context. First, the internal driving forces are accountability and impression management. The interviewees suggest that, while society’s awareness of corporate environmental accountability is the starting point of CET-related practices, an underlying motivation for these practices is impression management. It is worth mentioning that whether or not the board of directors is an internal driving force behind CET is still controversial. Second, the external driving forces are regulation and stakeholder pressure. The interviewees generally agree that it is the government and its regulatory policies that have an overwhelming influence on CET in the Chinese context. In addition, stakeholder groups, such as investors, the public, third parties, and industrial competitors, are thought to exert varying degrees of pressure to have CET in China.
The findings of this thesis have rich theoretical and practical implications. In terms of theoretical implications, this thesis not only supports and develops legitimacy and signalling theories in the environmental disclosure field, but also expands the application scope of stakeholder theory. In addition, the thesis indicates that government intervention theory may have strong explanatory power in the Chinese context. In terms of practical implications, several recommendations are made to environmental policy-makers. For example, legal requirements for mandatory environmental disclosure should be considered; environmental disclosure items need to be improved; reward and penalty mechanisms need to be established; environmental assurance standards need to be developed; and, green financial policies need to be optimised.
The findings of this thesis also contribute to existing knowledge. First, the thesis contributes new evidence to the argument that corporate environmental disclosure does not fully represent transparency. Second, the thesis establishes a conceptual framework for CET and contributes a measure of CET and so responds to the calls for more work that reviews existing research on transparency and which explores its measure and significance. Third, the thesis extends the existing studies on CET in emerging economies. Finally, the empirical finding in this thesis expands the previous literature on the relationship between CET and corporate financial performance, thus making an important contribution to knowledge.
This thesis sheds light on future research potential. In light of the exploratory nature of its qualitative investigation, there are still several unknown issues that require further academic attention, such as how much explanatory power the impression management perspective has on the CET, whether and to what extent the board of directors influences CET, and, how exactly peer pressure affects CET, etc. In addition, another promising direction would be to explore what consequences CET can have for companies over a long period of time, as the green transformation often takes a relatively long time to achieve. Future research on the long-term impact of CET will help to understand the true mechanisms of CET’s effect on companies.

text: Corporate environmental transparency in China The intensification of the environmental crisis has led stakeholders to pay increasing attention to corporate environmental transparency (CET). One obvious manifestation of this interest is that they require companies to present openness and disclose various information related to the environment. As an influential stakeholder group, policy-makers have also attached greater significance to the adoption of environmental policies based on information disclosure. For example, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), whose objective is to develop global sustainability disclosure standards, was established at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). In policy-making practice, transparency is often advocated as a prerequisite for legitimacy, policy efficiency, and good governance.
The direction of accounting research is often inextricably linked to changes in the field of practice. In recent years, the concept of transparency has attracted extensive attention among accounting scholars. However, current research tends to use corporate environmental disclosure as a measure of corporate transparency. In the context of the general absence of environmental disclosure regulation, and therefore of standardised (and comparable) disclosures, this trend is highly controversial. Some scholars have critically commented that in addition to corporate environmental disclosure, there are other channels, such as government websites, media news reports, etc., through which to make corporate environmental information transparent to the public.
As the country with the world’s highest share of carbon emissions, China is determined to accelerate various reform measures to achieve the carbon neutrality it has committed to reaching by 2060. Since 2017, China has implemented a mandatory environmental disclosure policy to promote the environmental transparency of listed companies and in so doing provides a promising policy environment and comparable standards for conducting CET research. Therefore, as a response to the academic call for more studies on the complex concept of transparency in the environmental accounting field, this thesis focuses particularly on the concept of CET and its related practices in the Chinese context.
The objective of this thesis is to develop a measure of CET and to apply that measure to assess both the environmental transparency of listed companies in China and the impact environmental transparency has on corporate financial performance. Furthermore, the thesis also aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the internal and external driving forces behind CET. To achieve this goal, the thesis set five specific research objectives and asked five research questions. Meeting these objectives and answering these questions involved both finding empirical results (such as correlations) and searching for explanations to gain a deeper understanding of causal mechanisms.
Driven by its research objectives and questions, this thesis follows a pragmatism philosophical stance. This paradigm can reconcile the contradiction between research objectives which stems from the long-standing subjective and objective debate between positivism and constructivism. In addition, pragmatism is regarded as providing philosophical and theoretical elements of mixed methods research design that lend mixed research argumentative coherence and validity. Therefore, a mixed research design is chosen for this thesis because the application of both quantitative and qualitative research methods contributes to a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the subject (i.e., CET) of the thesis. 
Guided by the mixed methods research design, this thesis consists of quantitative and qualitative investigations. There are two main findings in the quantitative investigation. First, the environmental transparency of Chinese listed companies does not meet the expectations of policy-makers. This finding is based on the assessment of CET in the Chinese context. Specifically, the mandatory environmental disclosure policy is not well followed; listed companies are suspected of concealing information about significant environmental administrative penalties, and there is a strong sense of mistrust among stakeholder groups towards corporate environmental disclosure, etc. Second, a significant negative correlation between CET and corporate financial performance was obtained through regression analysis on the sample companies. That finding shows that in the short term greater environmental transparency means higher environmental resource allocation, which in turn affects resource inputs in the production process and consequently has a negative impact on profits.
In addition, the qualitative investigation identifies the internal and external driving factors behind CET in the Chinese context. First, the internal driving forces are accountability and impression management. The interviewees suggest that, while society’s awareness of corporate environmental accountability is the starting point of CET-related practices, an underlying motivation for these practices is impression management. It is worth mentioning that whether or not the board of directors is an internal driving force behind CET is still controversial. Second, the external driving forces are regulation and stakeholder pressure. The interviewees generally agree that it is the government and its regulatory policies that have an overwhelming influence on CET in the Chinese context. In addition, stakeholder groups, such as investors, the public, third parties, and industrial competitors, are thought to exert varying degrees of pressure to have CET in China.
The findings of this thesis have rich theoretical and practical implications. In terms of theoretical implications, this thesis not only supports and develops legitimacy and signalling theories in the environmental disclosure field, but also expands the application scope of stakeholder theory. In addition, the thesis indicates that government intervention theory may have strong explanatory power in the Chinese context. In terms of practical implications, several recommendations are made to environmental policy-makers. For example, legal requirements for mandatory environmental disclosure should be considered; environmental disclosure items need to be improved; reward and penalty mechanisms need to be established; environmental assurance standards need to be developed; and, green financial policies need to be optimised.
The findings of this thesis also contribute to existing knowledge. First, the thesis contributes new evidence to the argument that corporate environmental disclosure does not fully represent transparency. Second, the thesis establishes a conceptual framework for CET and contributes a measure of CET and so responds to the calls for more work that reviews existing research on transparency and which explores its measure and significance. Third, the thesis extends the existing studies on CET in emerging economies. Finally, the empirical finding in this thesis expands the previous literature on the relationship between CET and corporate financial performance, thus making an important contribution to knowledge.
This thesis sheds light on future research potential. In light of the exploratory nature of its qualitative investigation, there are still several unknown issues that require further academic attention, such as how much explanatory power the impression management perspective has on the CET, whether and to what extent the board of directors influences CET, and, how exactly peer pressure affects CET, etc. In addition, another promising direction would be to explore what consequences CET can have for companies over a long period of time, as the green transformation often takes a relatively long time to achieve. Future research on the long-term impact of CET will help to understand the true mechanisms of CET’s effect on companies.

year: 2022

title: Health literacy: Patients' texts, context and mediation

authors: Balmer, Deborah G. Ballantyne

subjects: Health literacy

abstract: Health literacy encompasses people’s knowledge, motivation and competences to access, understand, appraise and apply health information to make judgments and take decisions in every-day life concerning health care, disease prevention and health promotion (Kickbusch et al., 2013).  Research in health literacy has grown in prominence as a separate entity over the last twenty years, partly in response to the growth of chronic disease requiring greater patient self-management.  Research has found significant relationships between reading comprehension levels and different health outcomes and health behaviours, with reading comprehension being used as a way to measure health literacy despite its accepted definition being much broader.  However, there has been little research which takes a social practices perspective on health literacy.  
In this thesis, health literacy is viewed from a social practices perspective.  Literacy events in this research have been predicated on the existence of written texts as part of a patient’s journey using health related texts, resources and services.  The thesis explores how people go about accessing, understanding, appraising and using health-related services and information, and the social and cultural practices inherent in those activities.  It asks how much written patient text is used with patients in hospital; who is using it; what the discourse features of those texts are; and how patients respond to the texts.  This mode of exploration is called textual ethnography (Swales, 1998).  
The research takes an ethnographic perspective not only on text, but also on participants and their journey.  It shadows eleven patients through a cardiology service of a hospital in New Zealand.  It identifies literacy events and practices occurring in that space and examines the patient texts themselves using a discourse analysis (Bax 2011; Faircough, 2003; Clerehan, Hirsh, & Buchbinder, 2009; Franken & Hunter, 2011) and geosemiotic (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) approach.  
The key themes to emerge from the research centre around the complexity of access to patient information, both physically and linguistically, and around the dynamics of patient agency.  The ability to encode and decode written text played a minor part in patient access to information.  The analysis showed that the amount and types of text material present for patients in hospital were limited.  Access to key texts required a deliberate decision by a health professional to dispense the text items.  Mediation of text in the research by literacy sponsors supported Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) observation that “access to literacy has always required assistance, permission, sanction, or coercion by more powerful others or, at least, contact with existing ‘grooves’ of communication” (p. 349).  Patient agency therefore came to the fore, and practices that patients did actually use to make information personal to them such as talking with room mates, or requesting paper and pencil were dynamic and socially mediated.  
Implications lie in the way health literacy is conceptualised, moving the focus from individual abilities as portrayed in current health literacy definitions, and pointing to the wider role of the health organisation and health care practitioners as literacy sponsors.  Practice implications arising from this reconceptualisation relate to patient information strategies within health care organisations and pedagogical implications for health professionals and adult literacy educators.  The notions of text mediation and full contextualisation of learning also became apparent with evidence pointing to the effectiveness of text mediation by a more knowing other.  The hospital itself was found to be a potentially rich and meaningful setting for adult learning about health where full contextualisation of adult learning is possible.  These patient learning opportunities need to be further exploited by health organisations and professionals.

text: Health literacy: Patients' texts, context and mediation Health literacy encompasses people’s knowledge, motivation and competences to access, understand, appraise and apply health information to make judgments and take decisions in every-day life concerning health care, disease prevention and health promotion (Kickbusch et al., 2013).  Research in health literacy has grown in prominence as a separate entity over the last twenty years, partly in response to the growth of chronic disease requiring greater patient self-management.  Research has found significant relationships between reading comprehension levels and different health outcomes and health behaviours, with reading comprehension being used as a way to measure health literacy despite its accepted definition being much broader.  However, there has been little research which takes a social practices perspective on health literacy.  
In this thesis, health literacy is viewed from a social practices perspective.  Literacy events in this research have been predicated on the existence of written texts as part of a patient’s journey using health related texts, resources and services.  The thesis explores how people go about accessing, understanding, appraising and using health-related services and information, and the social and cultural practices inherent in those activities.  It asks how much written patient text is used with patients in hospital; who is using it; what the discourse features of those texts are; and how patients respond to the texts.  This mode of exploration is called textual ethnography (Swales, 1998).  
The research takes an ethnographic perspective not only on text, but also on participants and their journey.  It shadows eleven patients through a cardiology service of a hospital in New Zealand.  It identifies literacy events and practices occurring in that space and examines the patient texts themselves using a discourse analysis (Bax 2011; Faircough, 2003; Clerehan, Hirsh, & Buchbinder, 2009; Franken & Hunter, 2011) and geosemiotic (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) approach.  
The key themes to emerge from the research centre around the complexity of access to patient information, both physically and linguistically, and around the dynamics of patient agency.  The ability to encode and decode written text played a minor part in patient access to information.  The analysis showed that the amount and types of text material present for patients in hospital were limited.  Access to key texts required a deliberate decision by a health professional to dispense the text items.  Mediation of text in the research by literacy sponsors supported Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) observation that “access to literacy has always required assistance, permission, sanction, or coercion by more powerful others or, at least, contact with existing ‘grooves’ of communication” (p. 349).  Patient agency therefore came to the fore, and practices that patients did actually use to make information personal to them such as talking with room mates, or requesting paper and pencil were dynamic and socially mediated.  
Implications lie in the way health literacy is conceptualised, moving the focus from individual abilities as portrayed in current health literacy definitions, and pointing to the wider role of the health organisation and health care practitioners as literacy sponsors.  Practice implications arising from this reconceptualisation relate to patient information strategies within health care organisations and pedagogical implications for health professionals and adult literacy educators.  The notions of text mediation and full contextualisation of learning also became apparent with evidence pointing to the effectiveness of text mediation by a more knowing other.  The hospital itself was found to be a potentially rich and meaningful setting for adult learning about health where full contextualisation of adult learning is possible.  These patient learning opportunities need to be further exploited by health organisations and professionals.

year: 2015

title: Enacting Kaitiakitanga Challenges and Complexities in the Governance and Ownership of Rongoā Research Information.

authors: Boulton, Amohia

subjects: Indigenous

abstract: This article explores the tensions one research team has faced in securing appropriate governance or stewardship (which we refer to as kaitiakitanga) of research data. Whilst ethical and regulatory frameworks exist which provide a minimum standard for researchers to meet when working with Māori, what our experience has highlighted is there is currently a “governance” gap in terms of who should hold stewardship of research data collected from Māori individuals or collectives. In the case of a project undertaken in the traditional healing space, the organisation best placed to fulfil this governance role receives no funding or support to take on such a responsibility; consequently by default, this role is being borne by the research team until such time as capacity can be built and adequate resourcing secured. In addition, we have realised that the tensions played out in this research project have implications for the broader issue of how we protect traditional knowledge in a modern intellectual property law context, and once again how we adequately support those, often community-based organisations, who work at the interface between Indigenous knowledge and the Western world.

text: Enacting Kaitiakitanga Challenges and Complexities in the Governance and Ownership of Rongoā Research Information. This article explores the tensions one research team has faced in securing appropriate governance or stewardship (which we refer to as kaitiakitanga) of research data. Whilst ethical and regulatory frameworks exist which provide a minimum standard for researchers to meet when working with Māori, what our experience has highlighted is there is currently a “governance” gap in terms of who should hold stewardship of research data collected from Māori individuals or collectives. In the case of a project undertaken in the traditional healing space, the organisation best placed to fulfil this governance role receives no funding or support to take on such a responsibility; consequently by default, this role is being borne by the research team until such time as capacity can be built and adequate resourcing secured. In addition, we have realised that the tensions played out in this research project have implications for the broader issue of how we protect traditional knowledge in a modern intellectual property law context, and once again how we adequately support those, often community-based organisations, who work at the interface between Indigenous knowledge and the Western world.

year: 2014