Theory of media social responsibility

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the
presentation medium of corporate social and environmental web
site disclosure has an impact on user trust in such disclosure, and
to examine the effect of media richness on user perception about
corporate social and environmental responsibility.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper's methodology is a threebytwo betweensubjects
design experiment, manipulating presentation medium and
industry type. Participants viewed social and environmental web
site disclosures and completed and communicated their
perceptions of trust and the experimental companies' corporate
social responsibility.
Findings
The presentation medium richness of social and environmental
web site disclosures is positively associated with: trusting
intentions, but not trusting beliefs, of web site users; and user
perception of corporate social and environmental responsibility.
Research limitations/implications
As with all controlled experiments, the research design focused
on internal validity to maintain control over the task design,
manipulation, and measurement of variables. While this required
tradeoffs with external validity, the task was designed based on
realworld scenarios to maintain high levels of external validity
within the experimental setting.
Practical implications
The paper provides evidence that corporations could use
enhanced webbased technology to potentially mislead users
regarding their performance in the social domain.

Originality/value
The paper extends the visual disclosure literature by examining
the richness of the image/visual media, and investigates whether
user perceptions are impacted by the variations in its richness.