Responsible Business in a Changing World by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030369705
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

2 Literature Review

2.1 Sustainability Reporting

Sustainability is an important issue in contemporary international discourse. It became more relevant for corporations all over the world and more difficult to avoid it. Dyllick and Hockerts (2002) have been derived, from the sustainable development definition of the Brundtland Commission report, a definition of corporate sustainability which is “meeting the needs of a firm’s direct and indirect stakeholders without compromising its ability to meet the needs of future stakeholders”.

Large companies inform their stakeholders continuously about their social and environmental performance by publicizing sustainability reporting on their websites, which attracts government organization, research centers, environmental and social activists, and NGOs (Herzig and Schaltegger 2011). Many scholars criticize the sustainability accounting trend seeing that the sustainability reporting are invented for public relations issue and to win or maintain the agreement of stakeholders whose continuous support is important for the continuity and profitability of the business (Unerman et al. 2007). Moreover, we need to undertake a detailed and complex analysis of the organization’s actions for ecosystems, resources , habitats, and communities , and their interpretation in light of past and current impacts of organizations on these same systems (Gray and Milne 2002). O’dwyer indicated an increasing request from companies’ stakeholders for accountability and responsibility reasons resulting in the progressing of sustainability reporting (O’Dwyer et al. 2011). Consequently, several guidelines and recommendations for Sustainability reports have been published during the past years. Many scholars have compared the sustainability performance of transnational companies to their sustainability reports based on social and environmental criteria. Lyon and Maxwell (2011) complain that the misleading reporting behaviour is illegal, and there is some flexibility in how companies choose to report their achievements. Particularly, companies may choose to report on a “project level” or “entity level”.

However, as we have seen sustainability reporting should be a full and transparent reporting of how the organization contributes or probably depressed Sustainability in our planet but what is happening the firm selective what of their action should be part of its public information communications . In course of time, sustainability defenders have raised concerns about corporate dishonesty. This corporate behaviour led to introduce new term “greenwashing ” and “Organizational hypocrisy”. Analyzing the problem requires a clear definition of these two phenomena.

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