Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 763–781 www.elsevier.com/locate/aos 0361-3682/$ - see front matter  2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aos.2006.03.001 Can less environmental disclosure have a legitimising eVect? Evidence from Africa Charl de Villiers, Chris J. van Staden ¤ School of Accountancy, Massey University at Albany, Private Bag 102-904, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland, New Zealand Abstract Organizational legitimacy theory predicts that corporations will do whatever they regard as necessary in order to preserve their image of a legitimate business with legitimate aims and methods of achieving it. Legitimacy is mostly used in the social and environmental accounting research (SEAR) literature to support the idea that social disclosures will be maintained at present levels, or increased over time, to avert legitimacy crises. However, the SEAR literature contains some references to reasons for, and incidents of, reductions in social disclosures. We submit that legitimacy theory pre- dicts these reductions as much as it predicts maintaining or increasing disclosure levels. We conduct a content analysis of more than 140 corporate annual reports over a 9-year period in order to identify the trends in environmental disclosure by South African companies over time. We Wnd a reduction in environmental reporting after an initial period of increases for both Mining companies and Top-100 industrial companies. The decrease for Mining companies was bigger than that for Top-100 companies, both overall and when the results were split between speciWc and general information. The publication of general and speciWc information increased from 1994 to 1999; disclosure of speciWc information then declined by Wve times more than the decline in disclosure of general information. These trends are consistent with legitimacy theory and we conclude that legitimising objectives may also be served by changing the type (general/speciWc) or reducing the volume of environmental disclosures.  2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The consensus among researchers appears to be that corporate environmental reporting of all kinds is on the increase and will continue to increase over time. 1 Organizational legitimacy the- ory predicts that corporations will do whatever they regard as necessary in order to preserve their image of a legitimate business with legitimate aims and methods of achieving it. Therefore, companies may reduce environmental disclosures at some * Corresponding author. Fax: +64 9 441 8133. E-mail address: C.van-Staden@massey.ac.nz (C.J. van Sta- den). 1 See for example, Deegan, Rankin, and Tobin (2002), Gray, Kouhy, and Lavers (1995a) and Wilmshurst and Frost (2000).