Contributions of the Research

7.2.1 Contributions to Academic Literature

This thesis provides three primary contributions to academic literature. The first contribution of this study is the specific approach used to evaluate the reporting from the banking sample. While previous studies have focused on the linkages between

sustainability-related disclosures and financial performance, or the determinants in the extent of disclosure, a significant challenge has been the assessment of the indirect impacts of banking organizations. As a result, previous studies on the financial sector have arguable not assessed the sustainability performance appropriately. Generally, this could be attributed to various challenges: There still remains inherent challenges in measuring social impacts, which are further amplified when the social change is indirect in nature; and, the current state of social performance measurement frameworks and tools remain significantly fragmented with a lack of substantial guidance being paid towards the impacts of financial activities. Therefore, using the impact value chain, this thesis

developed an approach to collecting and evaluating the disclosure provided by banks.

This allows the quality of social impact assessments, per activity area, to be investigated and used in statistical studies.

The use of the impact value chain as a evaluative framework was chosen because it is a common approach to conceptualizing social change. Also, it is an underlying aspect to many social performance measurement systems. By identifying a common theme among the various performance approaches, data on the quality of social impact

assessments could be collected systematically. Thus, the first contribution of this thesis is the development and initial demonstration the measurement instrument for evaluating social impact assessments of organizations, and its use in developing social disclosure index scores.

The second contribution to academic literature that this thesis provides is multifaceted, but generally pertains to the enrichment of extant theories in social

accounting. Previously in literature, legitimacy and stakeholder theory did not explicitly focus on the social impact assessments of banking organizations. This thesis expanded the scope of these two theories to include the further insights into the determinants of social impact assessments of internal operations, philanthropic activities and financing activities of banks. Overall, the results suggest the assessment of internal operations receives the most legitimacy pressure and stakeholder disclosure demands, while philanthropic and financing activities receive less. For conventional banks, their size appears to be a good predictor of social impact assessment quality for internal operations, and financing activities.

The next, and related contribution to academia is the inclusion of social banks in a statistical study on the social impact assessment behaviours. This type of bank has grown in size recently, which has increased interest from academic and grey literature authors.

Previously, literature on social banks have focused on conceptual descriptions of this type of social enterprise, and case studies. From the perspective of legitimacy and stakeholder theory, the results of this thesis suggest that social banks are currently not facing the same pressures and demands to assess their social impacts. This could stem from the stark differences in size, and an assumed positive impact based on the industries, customers and beneficiaries that they finance.

Overall, this thesis has made three contributions to academic literature: the development and demonstration of measurement tool that can evaluate the quality of social impact assessments; the expansion of scope for legitimacy and stakeholder theory to explicitly include social impact assessments of banking organizations; and, the inclusion of social banks in the sample of this statistical study.

7.2.2 Contributions and Recommendations to Practitioners

From a practice perspective, this thesis provides three related main contributions.

First, the qualitative descriptions of the current best practices found provides insightful information to banking organizations, social enterprises and charities. These examples of high quality social impact assessments illustrate how the impact value chain can be operationalized and reported. Second, the results of the statistical tests provide

practitioners with the current state of social impact assessment, in terms of quality for

three activity areas of conventional and social banking organizations. This potentially can illustrate to both types of banks where improvements can be made, and helps explain why and when, through legitimacy and stakeholder theory, social impact assessments are beneficial. The results generally indicated a positive association between the the size of conventional banks and their assessment behaviours, as expected from the

multi-theoretical framework. Conversely, the assessment behaviours of social banks did not align with the extant theories used in this thesis. The results suggest that the differences between conventional and social banks can explain the difference in assessment

behaviour.

There are two broad recommendations for assessment, report preparers and management practitioners. First, is to start or continue to develop a sophisticated social accounting system that includes both efficiency (input and output indicators) and effectiveness (social outcome indicators) metrics. This system can be used to provide insightful information for decision-makers, but also to preemptively prepare for future legitimacy pressures and stakeholder demands for disclosure. Although this thesis showed that it appears that assessing indirect impacts are more challenging, there are strategic ways of reducing the friction for this activity. For instance, banks could have a clause in their financing agreements stipulating that social impact measurement and reporting is required.

Another recommendation is for banking organizations to assess the social impacts of their philanthropic and financing activities. For conventional banks, this could meet the demands as posited by the extant theories of this thesis, but could also help in curbing

accusations of greenwashing. From a social bank perspective, social impact assessments in these two activity areas could be an avenue for differentiation against their

conventional counterparts. A continued lack of assessments from social banks could pose a significant risk to the success of social banks in securing future grants, shareholders and depositors. For instance, if many conventional banks reporting on their contributions towards sustainable development, the impacts associated with social banks could be called into question.