Sustainability Case

Since around the early 1990s, many organizations throughout the world have been providing an increasing amount of information about their social and environmental performance in a variety of reports. Concerns associated with sustainability have increased since the early 1990s and the evolution of corporate social and environmental performance reporting appears to be related to these concerns, as developments in reporting are probably a reflection of changing community expectations about the performance and responsibilities of business. In examining various theoretical issues associated with social and environmental reporting, we structured our discussion to follow the why – to whom – for what – how stages of the sustainability reporting process.

In the why stage we explored various aspects of the motivations for organizations to engage in corporate social responsibility and social and environmental reporting. When a firm voluntarily discloses information publicly about its social and environmental performance this may imply that the managers are acknowledging that they are accountable to a broad group of stakeholders in relation to not only their financial performance, but also their social and environmental performance. However, not all people consider that managers have social responsibilities to a broad group of stakeholders. Some researchers believe that the prime responsibility of managers is to shareholders alone and, within these confines, to maximizing shareholder value. This narrow perspective of corporate responsibility seems to be becoming less widely accepted, becomes more widely accepted.

For the whom stage, we examined the range of stakeholders that different organizations are likely to wish to address in their social and environmental reporting strategies. This range of stakeholders is likely to be directly related to an organization's motives for engaging in social and environmental reporting. It will be very broad for organizations which operate in a manner consistent with the ethical branch of