The citizenship rights of shareholders and corporate reporting

Purpose This paper aims to purpose to contribute to the financial management knowledge literature by presenting the framework of citizenship rights of shareholders and evaluation of its identified factors through an argumentation-based fuzzy TODIM approach. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted mixed, inductive and deductive approaches to develop citizenship rights of shareholders framework, validate its practicability and verify its effectiveness in firms. In developing the framework and implementation procedure, the study used an exploratory data collection (qualitative) approach to review the phenomenon of citizenship rights of shareholders factors. Then, in this study’s second phase, fuzzy TODIM is used to evaluation of the areas identified in the presented framework. In this study, fuzzy-Delphi is also used to verify the reliability of the core components so that it is possible to generalize the factors to the TODIM process. Findings The results obtained from the process of thematic analysis indicate the identification of 3 global themes, 6 organizing themes and 34 basic themes, which are considered to constitute the citizenship rights of shareholders framework. Fuzzy analysis processes showed that the most important organizing theme of compliance with the citizenship rights of shareholders in corporate reporting is disclosure of shareholder protection capacities. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the few studies in the field of citizenship rights of shareholders and evaluation of its identified factors through an argumentation-based fuzzy TODIM approach. Because prior research has only described the importance of social values functions and investor protection in the form of a case study, and this study seeks to achieve a framework for the implementation of citizenship rights of shareholders in corporate reporting. Also, through the evaluation of Fuzzy TODIM, this study tries to develop the various capacities of citizenship in reporting. The originality of this study is, first, the identification of the driving fields of the citizenship rights of shareholders, and secondly, the study follows the fuzzy-Delphi and fuzzy TODIM of the organizing themes identified in Iranian corporate. Both implications raised in this section show the knowledge-enhancing and practical capacities of the study.