An-Najah Staff

The purpose of this study is to expand our knowledge about corporate social reporting and disclosure as an emerging accounting issue and about Jordan\'s response to such an issue. This study is based upon all (143) of the available 1996 annual reports of publicly-listed Jordanian shareholding companies (JSCs) from the four industry groupings (i.e. industrial, financial, services and insurance). The findings show that the sampled annual reports made some sort of corporate social disclosure (CSD). However, CSD seems to have received modest attention from most companies in Jordan in terms of the space devoted and subjects covered by such disclosure in annual reports This does not mean that all JSCs ignore CSD since there is a solid but small core of JSCs from banks and industrial companies who have articulated their CSD responsibilities in a convincing manner. The themes most commonly disclosed across the four industry groupings were human resources and community involvement. Environmental disclosure needs much more attention by the JSCs. Significant differences among the various industry groupings were noted with respect to the amounts, methods and locations of CSD in annual reports.