Stalking Sustainability Simon Zadek Chair, Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility, UK
Increasing numbers of companies are pronouncing on the integration of sustainable development into their strategic vision and operational policies and processes. But what does this mean for the way a company will need to measure, report and be run. This paper traces recent trends in the evolution in a critical piece of this puzzle: social responsibility. It explores the why and the how, focusing on the role of civil regulation and emerging standards in the field. Building on this, sustainability accounting, auditing and reporting is considered from the viewpoint of how organisational performance can be assessed against the broader system condition of sustainability. It highlights several qualitative dilemmas that will need to be resolved in designing appropriate approaches, emphasising the need to explore the basis of decision-making at the higher level of organisational governance as well as at operational levels
Dr Simon Zadek is Chair of the international professional body for social auditing, the Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility, having been Development Director of the New Economics Foundation and Chair of the Ethical Trading Initiative until the end of . He is on the Steering Committee of the Global Reporting Initiative, the Operating Council of the Global Alliance for Workers and Communities, and the International Advisory Committee of the Copenhagen Centre.
Corporate social • responsibility • Social auditing Sustainability • reporting • Civil regulation Corporate • governance
u
Thrace House, 44–46 Southwark St, London SE1 1 UN, UK
!
secretariat@accountability.org.uk zadek@csi.com
Simon has contributed to the development and practice of corporate responsibility and accountability as a practitioner advisor and external verifier, in building multi-stakeholder alliances to promote good practice, and through his writing. He has co-edited several books, including Building Corporate AccountAbility (with Peter Pruzan and Richard Evans; Earthscan, ), and more recently Mediating Sustainability: Growing Policy from the Grass Roots (with Jutta Blauert) (Kumarian Press, ). He has written on diverse topics such as environment and trade, indicators for sustainable development, Buddhist economics, social entrepreneurs, utopia and economics, ethical trade, civil regulation, new social partnerships, disability, and sustainable consumption.
GMI 26 Summer 1999
1
simon zadek
T
here are growing pressures for the social aspects of the sustainability conundrum to be addressed by corporations. However, the experience of environmental auditing and reporting has demonstrated just how difficult it is to establish a clear and commonly agreed approach to measuring and reporting on an organisation’s environmental performance. And getting all but a relatively small number of leadership corporations to take the environment seriously has proved to be notoriously difficult— even when financial gains can be and are demonstrated (SustainAbility ; WBCSD ). During the s, however, we have taken some significant steps forward in drawing the social out into the open. We have begun to explore its meaning in the organisational context, and to create systems, procedures and gradually standards that enable us to calibrate and manage relevant processes and outcomes (ISEA ). As we move along the millennium’s cusp, we are now for the first time in the modern era beginning to grapple systematically with the matter of sustainability as it bears across the three spheres: environmental, economic and social. This paper seeks to describe some of these more recent developments. It focuses particularly on the social dimensions of sustainability. This is not because the social is more or less important than the environment, a debate that seems worse than pointless. Concentrating on the social issues is helpful because it has been so marginal to date in the sustainability debate and practice. There is some catching up to do, and in recent years exactly such a process has been in play. This process has involved excitement and frustration in ample measure, and it is time to reflect on what we have got from that experience. Through the social we see both similarities to, and radical differences from, the environmental dimensions we arguably understand in some ways more clearly. Through the social we also begin to edge towards the grander aim of integration. But integration of the three spheres is not for the sake of conceptual completeness or tidiness. It is because organisations need to understand and at times make trade-offs between options, each of which offers a menu of possible costs and benefits. Integration is critically important for organisations to understand the full implications of the options they face and decisions they make. Integration is important for stakeholders to understand and effect what could and did go on, and to find ways to voice their sense of which trade-offs make sense, and which do not.
Which social? As good a place to start as any is to consider what we might want to include in the ‘social’. The Council on Economic Priorities, for example, describes several key spheres of ‘corporate responsiveness’ apart from the environment: charitable giving; human resources; health and safety; and international sourcing and child labour (CEP ). The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), building out from the ‘business excellence model’, provides a further perspective on ‘contribution to society’, as does the measurement rod of Corporate Community Involvement developed by Bruce Naughton Wade (Bruce Naughton Wade ). Fortune magazine recently published a list of ‘the best companies to work for in America’, based on measures of the way companies treat their staff (Branch ). The Centre for Tomorrow’s Company in association with Kleinwort Benson has, among others, defined criteria that allow the share prices of socially ‘inclusive’ companies to be tracked to determine their performance relative to other companies (Goyder ). Or, if transparency is the key, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), in association with the Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility (ISEA) and the Association of Certified
2
GMI 26 Summer 1999
stalking sustainability
Chartered Accountants (ACCA), have defined criteria for assessing the quality of transparency, focusing on the social sphere (Gonella et al. ). The problem is not, therefore, as some would have it, a shortage of benchmarks, measurement options and rating systems. There is an over-abundance of factors to take into account; and similarly of criteria, assessment frameworks and ranking systems to operationalise these factors into simplified, comparative measures of performance. Which, then, are the right ones? This is an extraordinary list of aspirations as to how humans should behave towards each other, preceded by a host of pragmatic measurement, reporting and improvement kits for the business sector. It should not, of course, lead us to forget that every society is permeated, indeed arguably made up of, social rules. Some are vested in national law, particularly labour law; some are embedded in less precise but equally (if not more) relevant social norms. Increasing numbers exist within international agreements. Notable among these are key conventions agreed through the International Labour Organisation (ILO); the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the most comprehensive and universally applicable standard directly addressing the responsibilities of business operating internationally, the International Labour Organisation’s Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy (ILO ); and the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD ). Some social norms are also set through omission: for example, the lack of social and environmental standard international trade regulations overseen by the World Trade Organisation.
Why should companies bother? Increasingly, public statements by senior managers of leading companies seek to establish a bridgehead between sound business and civil practice. But why should companies bother? One way of thinking about this is through the ‘Rationale Triangle’, represented in Figure (Zadek et al. ). a The Managerialist rationale: that to survive and prosper in society, business needs to know what is happening, what people think about them, and how best to respond to and influence those perspectives. At the simplest level, this speaks to the need for good market research and public relations. At the more sophisticated level, this highlights the need for managers to have a broader understanding and appreciation of stakeholder needs and views, and the patterns of demands on business that are likely to arise in the future. b The Public Interest rationale at the second corner of the triangular spectrum concerns the ability of society to make business respond to changing interests and needs. This public interest perspective emerged particularly in the s, but has become institutionalised more recently in the growing ethical consumer and investment movements. Here, businesses are not merely choosing to undertake some form of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting as a means of understanding and manipulating their social environment, but are rather being forced to respond to demands from the actors that make up that environment. c The third corner of the triangle is the most contentious, since it refers more to a Value Shift in business than a compliance or managerialist-based response to new pressures. Here lies the view that business can evolve and take on a different historic
GMI 26 Summer 1999
3
simon zadek
Managerialist/stakeholder management
Value shift/base
Public interest/ accountability
Figure 1: rationale triangle
role in society, at the same time as the roles traditionally taken on by the state are increasingly under threat. Leaders are tending to question the raison d’être of their company’s and their own activities and are searching for an expanded repertoire of explanations and measures of success that are provided by the bottom line. Companies are increasingly under pressure from civil institutions to impose social and environmental standards along the economic pathways over which they have some leverage and control. This includes the spheres within their own organisational and legal boundaries—for example in relation to their own staff—and increasingly down so-called global production or supply chains. These pressures come in the form of activist campaigning which aims to damage companies’ market performance by undermining their reputation (Zadek and Amalric ). These pressures are not linked in the main to public regulation, except in so far as the regulatory threat is one basis for successful campaigns. At the same time, this is not a matter of ‘voluntary’ approaches in any meaningful sense. Rather, companies are responding to an organic ‘civil regulatory framework’. Such civil pressures are not, however, the sole or maybe even the most important driver for companies embracing ‘value-based’ approaches to doing business. Of equal if not greater importance are the organisational and market changes associated with contemporary technological developments and the process of globalisation. With respect to the former, we are seeing the most radical shift in the manner in which commerce is organised since Taylorian mechanics entered our organisational vocabulary. The downsizing and flattening of the main rump of most corporations, and the dispersal of many of their core functions into market networks (through, for example, franchising and outsourcing), all raise new demands with regard to quality at every level. The combination of technological developments in the area of computing and communications—and increasingly their relationship—has vastly reinforced the tendencies towards ‘functional dispersal’. At the same time this has tightened market and cost-based competition in ways that place enormous pressure on the need to make these dispersed operations work at their peak of possible performance.
4
GMI 26 Summer 1999
stalking sustainability
Globalisation has both enabled and driven these tendencies further. Opportunities for cost reduction and accessing new markets through physical and cultural extensions of the business process has placed further pressures on the traditional business unit. For example, this has focused the source of value-added and profit on supply rather than production, and brand rather than product leadership. A ‘stakeholder-based company’ that is able to build trust and integrity into its key relationships thereby lowers the cost of establishing and maintaining increasingly complex networks of suppliers, franchisees and agents; physically dispersed staff (Wheeler and Sillanpää ). Such a company is able to handle more effectively multiple levels of actual and potential regulators from the local town council to the World Trade Organisation. A stakeholderbased company is one that in many respects is most fit to take advantage of the technological and regulatory changes that underpin and enable the globalisation of trade, production and marketing. Another way of understanding this is through an examination of the rising importance of intangible assets. These are made up particularly of skills, knowledge, relationships and reputation. Intangible assets are increasingly important, particularly for those companies with a competitive advantage focused heavily on knowledge creation or/and market position. One recent study suggested that as much as % of global financial assets comprises brand value (Clifton and Maughan ). The significance of intangible assets explains why companies are rightly concerned to protect their reputations, to recruit the best people and to create an environment suited to innovation. These facets of intangible assets go some way to explaining why there has been such a dramatic growth in stakeholder engagement, non-financial measures and increased transparency. In the short term this may be rooted in the protection and enhancement of brand and reputation. However, this is at best a static, one-off gain. The longer-term contribution to competitive advantage lies in the contribution to dynamic, active knowledge through the development of new social networks, more nuanced risk assessment processes, and more effective product development and communication. It is in this context that new tools such as ‘social auditing’ need to be understood, such as the ‘intellectual capital’ approach developed by Skandia (Skandia ).
What companies do So what do companies do? Faced with good reason for acting, and a host of possible social standards, how do companies then operationalise their response? Part of the answer is that there are in most cases many things that companies are already doing, and might simply want to do better, or make more visible. As a senior executive of a large telecommunications company argued, ‘our greatest contributions lie in the income we give to people we employ, the taxes we pay, and the technological gains that our investments and operations bring to individuals and the overall economy’. In one sense this is clearly correct. The core business has a greater social impact than the philanthropic side of any business, however great and effective that might be. The most significant shift in corporate responsibility in recent years has indeed been the increasing acknowledgement by large companies that social responsibility is about the way they do business, not about corporate giving. This focus on core business is leading to the emergence of new and renewed business tools which take social and environmental issues more into account. Social labelling accompanied by effective monitoring and verification against agreed standards is one means whereby companies seek to establish social issues at the heart of the business process,
GMI 26 Summer 1999
5
simon zadek
There has been a shift in the language of these statements from: t If being good is good for business, then we will be good; to t It is good for business to be good; to t It is necessary for business to be good.
Recent statements by BP superbly illustrate the third level—for example: A good business should be both competitively successful and a force for good (BP 1998). Box 1: shifting discourse
from supply through to the consumer. There has been an explosion of such labels, intended to reward companies that demonstrate good behaviour in the consumer market, including the ‘Rugmark’ associated with monitoring the use of child labour in the production of carpets in India; the fair-trade marks of the Max Havelaar Foundation in the Netherlands and the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK awarded to fairly traded coffee; and the social label awarded by the Abrinq Foundation in Brazil to companies that demonstrate that they do not exploit child labour. While a significant development, a recent study published by the European Commission has raised questions about the effectiveness of such initiatives (Zadek et al. ). The study concludes that for social labels to move beyond the niche product and niche ‘aware’ consumer will take considerable consumer education, and will probably require the application of fiscal incentives to make labelled products more attractive to consumers on price as well as ethical terms. A further tool used more on rather than by companies is ethical investment. According to the latest study by the US Social Investment Forum, the total value of all ‘responsibly invested’ assets under management in the US climbed from US$ billion in to US$. trillion in (Social Investment Forum ). Such investments now represent about % of new dollar inflows. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe the comparable figure is much lower, but is rapidly climbing. Critically, the leverage of still relatively small ethical investment holdings can be considerable. In the UK, for example, the shareholder action group, PIRC, has achieved much by being able to table shareholder motions with control over only very small shareholdings. South Africa has seen the launch of a number of ‘black empowerment’ venture funds, targeted to supporting companies owned and managed by black business people excluded from economic opportunities during the apartheid period.
Social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting Some of the more interesting tools to emerge during the s have been methodologies for social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting (‘social auditing’ for short). Companies seeking to take greater account of social issues—for whatever reason—need to know the views of stakeholders who do count (Zadek a). They also need to know how these views are changing over time, and how they are likely to determine attitudes and actions by stakeholders—whether individual or collective—towards the company.
6
GMI 26 Summer 1999
stalking sustainability
Thus, companies seek to measure and disclose their social and ethical performance in order: t
To understand what they are trying to achieve and how best to measure performance against their aims
t
To know what they are doing
t
To understand the implications of what they are doing
t
To understand in what ways if any they can explain their actions to increasingly sceptical and aggressive stakeholders
t
To understand whether there are practical options for improving their social performance in ways that will not harm their business performance, and may in many cases improve it
Surely, you might argue, senior managers at least know what they are doing? The worrying answer to this is: not always, and often not in critical areas where ‘soft’ information is required. In one recent internal seminar run for a major multinational, an overhead was shown of an article about people demonstrating against the employment of child labour. The seminar’s facilitator laughingly said, ‘of course, you don’t do this sort of thing’. A nervous silence was followed by one of the more outspoken participants blurting out: ‘But that is the whole point. We don’t know. This whole downsizing and decentralisation has meant that we no longer get information about these sorts of things. And even if we did, we would never get a chance to look at it, or do anything about it.’ This proved to be a prescient statement. Just a few months later, the company was subjected to an aggressive challenge in the national press over its social, ethical and environmental record in and around one of its major facilities in the South, a facility that had the reputation within the company of having ‘best-practice’ community relations and environmental programmes. Managers need to understand the factors that influence their company’s performance. These include an increasingly complex matrix of non-technical, non-financial factors— exactly the kinds of factor that they and their companies are ill-equipped to find out about, and even less equipped to understand. Hence the ‘Tomorrow’s Company’ initiative concluded: ‘tomorrow’s company is able to develop a framework of measurement that . . . will include financial components but will also feedback on the values [and] the health of key relationships’ (RSA ). This is not just a question of more market surveys covering a wider range of issues. Shell has been supporting environmental issues for several decades, and until the Brent Spar fiasco was seen as a reasonably ‘green company’. No amount of traditional market research would have been likely to predict the public response to Greenpeace’s call not to sink the Brent Spar. Similarly, it is very unlikely that the managers of toys, sportswear and textiles companies in the late s would have believed that the consuming public would respond as they have in the last couple of years to concerns about labour conditions in suppliers in the South. After all, they would have argued, it has always been this way, and consumers benefit from poor labour conditions in terms of cheaper products. The evolution of people’s ethical positions is, perhaps thankfully, not purely guided by such thoughtless logic. Companies are increasingly realising that merely asking people their opinion about things does not reveal the dynamic process of how and in what directions people develop their thinking on the basis of deeply rooted values. ‘Counting’ in the traditional sense of polling people’s views may work in choosing between different flavours of ice cream, but it rarely helps in understanding how people develop a sense of moral concern, and
GMI 26 Summer 1999
7
simon zadek
how this concern is voiced. Understanding stakeholders’ views requires much more than simple survey work. Some deeper social contract is needed to go beyond inaccurate counting to a point where stakeholders begin to feel that their views count. Companies realise now that they need to understand the underlying ‘climatic conditions’ that underpin people’s values if they want to be able to predict how they will respond to any particular situation. This has dramatic implications. In moving away from the conventions of traditional market surveying that do little more than observe the ‘weather’ at any point in time, companies are faced with a far more complex dynamic that can only really be understood if they actually engage and gain people’s trust. So companies now understand the need to ‘count ethics’. Most importantly this is to understand things that are going on that were not previously considered important to the daily life of a busy manager. What follows from this acceptance of the need to measure is the realisation that conventional approaches do not always work. Measuring turns out to be far more than a purely ‘subject–object’ phenomenon, a ‘we measure it’ situation. It turns out that, insofar as measuring is about understanding the deeper patterns that inform people’s attitudes and actions, alternative approaches to measurement are needed. There are clear signs of a convergence of standards taking place in the practice of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting. The relevance of both external benchmarks and stakeholder dialogue is confirmed in most current practice, albeit to differing degrees in each case. Even those approaches that have focused exclusively on one or other element are now moving towards some combination. The originators of the Ethical Accounting Statement, for example, are actively exploring how external benchmarks as well as verification might be used where the approach has to date focused exclusively on stakeholder dialogue. Companies such as British Telecom, which are known for their environmental reporting and activities related to the European Total Quality Management, are now actively exploring how best to integrate these experiences with the emerging standards in social and ethical accounting and auditing. Within the public and private, non-profit communities, increasingly attention is also being given to this emerging body of experience. A similar convergence is taking place in the understanding of the need for and roles of the external agent, although again with different emphases. Ben & Jerry’s, for example, has in its recent history of social performance reports seen the external agent essentially as an ‘evaluator’, asked to pass personal judgement on the company’s social performance. More recently, however, it has been experimenting with a move away from this personalised judgement process more towards a view of the external agent as ‘auditor’, charged with the duty of ensuring that the published statement is a correct description of what happened over the period, rather than his or her view of those events. There is a gradual consensus emerging as to what constitutes some of the key principles of ‘good practice’ that need to be reflected in any sound approach (Gonella et al. ; ISEA ). This understanding is focused on three key areas. First, to ensure that social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting becomes an increasingly bounded and hence defined set of activities, it must become less and less possible for anyone to describe anything as being the practice of social and ethical accounting and auditing. Second, not only the activity and outcomes, but their quality, should become subject to assessment as a part of the ‘professionalisation’ process. Third, there is a need to ensure that the skills and experiences that are required to support the process of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting become more and more precisely specified and testable. This emerging consensus is being driven in the main by the Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility, and the individuals and organisations that have come together around AccountAbility’s networks of activity. Far from closing the door to further experimentation, this emerging consensus allows for a more systematic assessment of different
8
GMI 26 Summer 1999
stalking sustainability
approaches, a clearer dialogue between them and their users, and a deeper appreciation of what skills and experience are required to make any process effective in achieving understanding, transparency and accountability.
Thinking about sustainability This brief tour of some of the issues and options in taking the ‘social’ more into account in moving business towards responsible practices brings us back to the matter of ‘sustainability’. At one level, we are interested in finding a way of bringing together the social, the environmental and the economic. The metaphor of the ‘triple bottom line’ is useful in getting business managers and boards to conceive of the possibility and appropriateness of such a task (Elkington ). However, the metaphor breaks down when one tries to use it to ground a conceptual framework that allows us to understand what really needs to be done. There are a number of issues to take into account in grounding one’s thinking and practice in building operational tools for companies wishing to take the fuller sphere of sustainable development into account, some of which are discussed below (Zadek b). The main problem is quite simply that ‘sustainability’ refers to a system condition. Organisations, however large, are subsystems. The relationship between these two levels in understanding the pathway to sustainable development is not clear. It is reasonable, for example, to conclude that less pollution is a good thing if the objective is environmental sustainability. But if the objective is overall sustainability, is less pollution a good thing if people are put out of work? There is no obvious way to value the trade-offs between pluses and minuses across the three domains of sustainable development (or indeed often within them). Any systematic approach to sustainability auditing will therefore need to embrace the evolutionary nature of our understanding of sustainability and its implications for our day-to-day practice. We are only now beginning to understand some of the dynamic feedback loops between the different spheres that need to be taken into account, and our ability to model these relationships should improve over time. Any methodology must be flexible enough to cope with this learning process. As our understanding of sustainability evolves, sustainability accounting, auditing and reporting should be able to respond and evolve as well. The second issue concerns the matter of ‘intentions’. There is a tension between understanding an organisation’s ‘behaviour’ and its ‘intention’. Shifts in ‘intentionality’ are important lead indications of change. Most accounting and auditing methods in use today focus on behaviour. While accepting that in the main it is behaviour and indeed impact that really counts, shifts in value often concern organic movements in the perceived understanding and intentions of individuals groups within and around the organisations concerned. For example, when Shell announces that it is moving from being a ‘carbon’ to an ‘energy’ company, how can a sustainability report handle this information? It is not enough merely to register the fact that it has made this statement. Nor is it sufficient to predict what it might mean in the future if the company makes some of the moves it has said it will make. These pieces of information are necessary, but not sufficient. At the same time, it is inadequate to measure only what effects their statements have had in some past accounting period, since this may massively understate the real significance of the ‘new thinking’ event that has taken place over that period. The third issue concerns the matter of weak versus strong sustainability. Sustainability auditing makes little sense unless we work with what has become known as ‘weak
GMI 26 Summer 1999
9
simon zadek
sustainability’, which does not automatically reject transfers from environmental to social and other forms of capital. Both views of sustainability carry normative implications, albeit quite different ones. Each involves different ways of thinking about accounting. The first can be understood in purely biophysical terms, while the second needs to be versed in terms that allow for trade-offs between social, economic and environmental goods and bads, which cannot be set out in purely biophysical terms. Indeed, since the ‘weak’ sustainability version involves the ‘valuing’ of social goods and bads, it implies the need for ‘negotiated valuation’ systems of some kind (since market-based valuation is not likely to prove satisfactory to many key stakeholders). However, if we focus on ‘strong sustainability’, we will be forced into an extreme normative framework that rejects the possibility of the positive value of using natural capital to form social capital, income and wealth. On the other hand, weak sustainability is based on an assumption of substitutability between different forms of capital—and, like all assumptions, there are some circumstances where it fails. Therefore, we need to have some overarching sense of environmental constraints, and the role that an organisation plays in pushing us towards or helping us stay within that limit. The discussion about capital transfers and weak sustainability brings us squarely to the fourth point, which concerns the matter of governance. It is by exploring the governance of an organisation—that is, the decision-making processes, the rewards and sanctions, and incentives for different stakeholders—that we can really begin to understand whether an organisation has really begun to ‘think’ differently. A sustainability audit must be able to analyse interactions between people, the organisation and the environment. It should lay out who is central to the governance of the organisation, what interests they represent and incentives structures for staff. For example, what staff behaviour and decisions reap rewards? Is a staff member encouraged and rewarded for breaking the ‘values statements’ of an organisation in favour of greater financial success above all else? It is a relief in a way that all routes lead to decision-making and, in particular, governance. Endless manifestos concerning the macro dimensions of sustainable development have highlighted its connection to democracy and citizens’ participation. Too much of this, however, has remained at the level of principle and ideal. Now in considering what would logically be covered in a sustainability audit drives us to the same conclusion, not from ideals, but from the practicalities of good practice accounting, auditing and reporting. This coherence between the high-level aims and micro-level tools that need to be evolved is very attractive, to say the least.
Accountable futures There are many ways to approach the subject of business and sustainability. This brief paper has covered but a few of its dimensions. There has been no mention, for example, of the emerging phenomenon of new social partnerships, of civil security issues, of the significance of ageing, of the driving effect of unsustainable consumption patterns, and of the deeper and arguably invidious dynamics of the financial community. Sustainable development is indeed a ‘systems’ issue, and we have to grapple in practice with the chaotic dynamics that that implies. But as an old friend and colleague, Alan Parker, commented when asked how to get going in social auditing, ‘put your bucket down and start digging’ (Parker ). For companies, and those who can and do seek to influence their practices, this means embracing the principles of sustainable development, and exploring how to put these principles into
10
GMI 26 Summer 1999
stalking sustainability
practice. Social accounting is basic to this exploration, since without it the pathway is shrouded in mist, or at least offers a lopsided view. Auditing and public reporting of social and environmental performance is a critical next step, since it is an acknowledgement not only of a broader accountability, but also of the need to learn from stakeholders who have been historically marginalised from decision-making. Beyond this, the imperatives of integrating social and environmental goals and measures of performance with the ‘financials’ become the real step towards placing the process of business within the framework of sustainability. It is here that we reach the governance issues, and begin to come to grips with the underlying purpose of companies in the st century and hopefully beyond.
References Branch, S. () ‘The Best Companies to Work for in America’, Fortune . ( January ): . BP (British Petroleum) () What we stand for: Our Business Policies (London: BP). Bruce Naughton Wade () Benchmarking Corporate Community Involvement: the Bruce Naughton Wade ‘CCI ’ Index (London: BNW ). CEP (Council on Economic Priorities) () ‘Screening the Corporate Responsiveness of Transnational Corporations: Results from Case Studies with Selected Companies’ (unpublished report; New York: CEP ). Clifton, R., and E. Maughan () The Future of Brands (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan). Elkington, J. ( ) Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of st-Century Business (Oxford, UK : Capstone). Gonella, C., A. Pilling, and S. Zadek( ) Making Values Work: Contemporary Experiences in Social and Ethical Accounting, Auditing and Reporting (London: New Economics Foundation in association with the Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants). Goyder, M. () Living Tomorrow’s Company (Aldershot, UK: Gower). ILO (International Labour Organisation) () Tripartite Declaration of Principles Concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy (Geneva: ILO). ISEA (Institute of Social and Ethical AccountAbility) () AccountAbility : A Standard for Social and Ethical Accounting, Auditing, and Reporting (London: ISEA). OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) () The OECD Guidelines for Multi national Enterprises (Paris: OECD). Parker, A. () ‘An Expert’s View: Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc.’, in S. Zadek, P. Pruzan and R. Evans (eds.), Building Corporate AccountAbility: Emerging Practices in Social and Ethical Accounting, Auditing, and Reporting (London: Earthscan): -. RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce) () Tomorrow’s Company: The Role of Business in a Changing World (London: RSA). Skandia () ‘Visualising Intellectual Capital’, in Skandia: Supplement to Skandia’s Annual Report (Sweden: Skandia). Social Investment Forum () Report on Responsible Investing Trends (Washington, DC: Social Investment Forum). SustainAbility () The Non-Reporting Report (London: SustainAbility). WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) () Environmental Performance and Share holder Value (Geneva: WBCSD). Wheeler, D., and M. Sillanpää ( ) The Stakeholder Corporation: A Blueprint for Maximising Stakeholder Value (London: Pitman). Zadek, S. (a) ‘Balancing Performance, Ethics, and Accountability’, Journal of Business Ethics (Special Issue) .: -. Zadek, S. (b) Stalking the Sustainability Audit(unpublished paper presented to the CERES Conference in Boston). Zadek, S., and F, Amalric () ‘Consumer Works!’, Development . (Special Issue, March ,): - . Zadek, S., P. Pruzan and R. Evans (eds.) () Building Corporate AccountAbility: Emerging Practices in Social and Ethical Accounting, Auditing, and Reporting (London: Earthscan). Zadek, S., S. Lingayah and M. Forstater (New Economics Foundation) () Social Labels: A Framework for Analysis (Brussels: European Commission).
q GMI 26 Summer 1999
11