The article in the url below focuses on the value to stakeholders of firms’ CSR reports:
“Most of the world’s top companies now issue non-financial statements, up from almost zero a decade ago, and soon everyone will. … Do they offer any real value to stakeholders or are they just propaganda?”
In trying to answer that question:
“We have to ask ourselves hard questions: what purpose do these reports serve and do they do their job? And which companies are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to candidly reporting the social impact of their operations?”
The author argues that it is crucial to be able to compare one firm’s performance with another’s, rather than declaring specific firms and whole industries as acceptable (or not) in terms of CSR:
“The sustainability community is split between “best practice” adherents such as SAM and “sin screen” absolutists, like the designers of the FTSE4Good, which excludes BAT. The latter rewards companies based on an absolute, if arbitrary, ranking of sustainability; the former rewards comparative behaviour and improvement.”
The core of this debate, therefore, revolves around the issue of absolute versus comparative measures of performance. Evaluating CSR is inherently nuanced—an aggregate measure of multiple strengths and weaknesses. No firms are absolutely good and very few, if any, are absolutely bad. But, there are clearly some firms that are better than others. Attempting to capture this relative difference is a sign that any measurement tool is on the right track:
“Lo and behold! Using these various standards and verification frameworks, the messier industries, from tobacco to mining to oil production, have consistently ranked among the best companies for disclosing what they do, addressing their sustainability footprint and providing independent integrity assurance.”
Take care
David
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
The contrarian – Reporting contradictions
Praising so-called evil companies for good corporate responsibility reporting is better than bashing them for what they are, argues Jon Entine
Jon Entine
June 7, 2009
http://www.ethicalcorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=6492
