Abstract

Narrative Analysis of Annual Reports has been of interest, especially with the emergence of CorporateGovernance and disclosure norms across the world and with the emergence of International Integrated Reporting. There are five genres of narrative analyses around Annual Reports texts: subjective analyst ratings, disclosure index studies, thematic content analysis, readability studies, and linguistic studies. For this study, we used a constructed disclosure index to analyze and compare the level of Annual Reports disclosure with respect to Corporate social responsibility activities for selected companies in India before and after the legal mandate. Four sections of the Annual Reports, namely Chairman’s Message, Separate section for CSR, Director’s report, and Management discussion and analysis of the 102 most valuable companies were analyzed. The study revealed the segment on “Chairman’s Message” was the least Corporate social responsibility disclosure and the segment “Director’s report” was the most Corporate social responsibility disclosure. Environment appeared to be Corporate social responsibility CSR activities disclosed by the companies in their Annual Reports and “others” was Corporate social responsibility CSR activities disclosed by the companies in their Annual Reports taking all the segments together. The study Corporate social responsibility Disclosure Index of 54% for the six years under consideration. For 96.08% of the companies under consideration, average CSRDI had shown a significant increase in the post-mandate period as compared to the pre-mandate period.