Emancipatory accounting in China: does alternative social reporting of non-governmental organisations address corporate social responsibility problems?

With the increasing number of corporate scandals such as Enron, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement has become a global phenomenon and attracted ever more attention nowadays. Although a large number of corporations have begun to choose corporate social reporting to provide social and environmental information for proclaiming their social responsibilities, corporate social reporting is widely regarded as a public relation opportunity to respond to social pressures. Treating corporate social reporting as an addendum to conventional accounting which serves for ruling classes in society, critical accounting researchers suggest radical changes of current social accounting practices and alternative accounting practices to go beyond the conventional accounting practices and to have positive impact on CSR development. Focusing on the potential transformative nature of accounting and alternative social reporting of Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs), this paper investigates roles of NGOs’ social reporting in generating emancipatory changes of accounting as well as promoting CSR development in China, from both theoretical and empirical ways. On the basis of empirical work, the paper concludes that NGO’s social reporting, as a form of emancipatory accounting practices in China, plays a positive role in CSR development; however, its influence is restricted due to several reasons.