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Social and Environmental Accounting as Symbolic and Substantive Means of Legitimation: The Case of HIV/AIDS Reporting in South Africa Teerooven Soobaroyena * and Collins G. Ntimb aCentre for Research in Accounting, Accountability and Governance Southampton Management School University of Southampton Southampton, SO17 1BJ Tel: + (44) 2380 59 8962 Fax: + (44) 2380 59 3844 Email: t.soobaroyen@soton.ac.uk bAccounting and Finance Business School University of Glasgow Glasgow, G12 8QQ Tel: +44 (0)141 330 7677 Fax: +44(0) 141 330 4442 E-Mail: collins.ntim@glasgow.ac.uk *Corresponding author Social and Environmental Accounting as Symbolic and Substantive Means of Legitimation: The Case of HIV/AIDS Reporting in South Africa Abstract We develop an interpretive framework which combines Suchman’s (1995) work on the dynamics of organisational legitimacy and Ashforth and Gibbs’ (1990) concepts of symbolic and substantive management to investigate how and why public corporations rely on symbolic and substantive social disclosures. We apply this framework to the case of the HIV/AIDS health crisis in South Africa (SA) and examine the corporate disclosure behaviour of a sample of 75 SA-listed corporations from 2003 to 2009. We use content analysis procedures to codify the disclosures and devise a disclosure index based on the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines on HIV/AIDS to assess whether corporations have adopted a substantive management strategy. Our findings suggest that public corporations use a combination of substantive and symbolic disclosures in a bid to seek specific forms of moral legitimacy (structural, procedural, and consequential) and pragmatic legitimacy (dispositional, influence, and exchange). Our analysis reveals that the mix of substantive and symbolic disclosures is altered as a result of changes in stakeholder salience, societal attitudes and the corporation’s current ‘state’ of legitimacy. Overall, the findings