Answering allegations: the use of the corporate website for restorative ethical and social disclosure

Abstract

Company websites have become increasingly ambitious and elaborate in their functionality (Adams & Frost 2003). From websites that contained information that was little more than an electronic rendering of hard copy publications (e.g. accounting reports), advancing technology, increasing sophistication and interactivity have precipitated an information-transfer environment in which websites can not only contain a much broader range of information but also provide for the information needs of a broader (in historical terms) range of stakeholders. Companies have employed website technology for an increasing number of purposes. These have included marketing, selling (Lymer 1999), reporting (Xiao et al. 2002; Marston 2003) and, in a recent study (Adams & Frost 2003), reputation management was cited as a possible function. In order to explore the usefulness of websites as a possible vehicle for ‘ethical’ reputation management communication (and in so doing, address an empirical deficit), a method was developed for testing for website responses to public allegations of specific ethical malpractice or faux pas. In addition to informing the question as to the uses that corporate websites may be put, a second purpose of this paper is to explore qualitative and quantitative aspects of content analysis method relevant to website interrogation. Eight large organisations were selected on the basis that they had had one or more publicly made allegations of an ethical nature against them. Upon interrogating their websites in the summer of 2002, all were found to provide voluntary website disclosures pertaining to the allegations although the ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’ of the responses were not consistent. The responses to the allegations did not appear to be affected by the ‘age’ of the allegation, thus suggesting that a threat to an otherwise good reputation may be long-lasting. The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, the literature relating to the uses of websites in disclosure and reporting is reviewed. Some of the issues surrounding the pros and cons of using websites over hard copy for reporting purposes are discussed. The method used in the study is then discussed and the results are presented. A discussion of the findings concludes the paper.