Page 172 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

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between economic output and ecological input (eco-efficiency) in their environmental,
business and financial reports. The concept of eco-efficiency, first developed in
academia (Schaltegger and Sturm 1990), has been popularised by the World Business
Council for Sustainable Development (Schmidheiny 1992), which subsequently took
the lead in disseminating the eco-efficiency approach into business practice. In con-
trast to the history of the eco-efficiency concept, an analogous analysis and presenta-
tion of socio-efficiency, as the link between social and economic issues, has received
less attention in business reports – partly due to difficulties in quantifying social
aspects. Socio-economic considerations were however already present in the 1970s
and social reporting practices and elements of these, such as the value added state-
ments, have survived in sustainability reports (e.g. Diageo’s 2009 Corporate Citizenship
Report, The Co-operative’s Sustainability Report 2009) or financial reports (e.g. the
2009 Annual Reports of BMW and Merck).
Since the mid-1990s, and increasingly towards the end of that decade, attention
shifted to sustainability reports (e.g. Kolk 2004). These reports reflect companies´
claims to depict an overall picture of their sustainability activities and to inform
stakeholders as to what extent and how corporations contribute to sustainable devel-
opment. One of the main challenges related to such integrative sustainability report-
ing is to outline the impacts of corporate activities from the different angles of the
three (environmental, social and economic) perspectives, including conflicting
goals, dilemmas, synergies, priorities and decision-making processes (contextual
integration challenge). In practice these aspects have so far been considered primar-
ily in an additive and less than integrative manner – failing to recognise and men-
tion possible and actual conflicts and challenges embodied in their approach to
corporate sustainability (Gray 2006; Herzig and Godemann 2010). In addition, sus-
tainability reporting requires reflection on how to incorporate principles and aspects
derived from the vision of sustainability development, in particular those of social
justice, intra- and intergenerational equity, pluralistic and consultative
decision-making, and different temporal timeframes – something that Buhr (2007)
criticises as largely underdeveloped in current practice. Nevertheless, unlike in the
1970s, social aspects within sustainability reports are nowadays often more globally
and also more comprehensively dealt with, in terms of moral and ethical questions
of sustainable development, such as child labour in the supply chain, human rights,
poverty alleviation, gender issues, trading relationships, etc. Besides the contextual
challenge, integrative sustainability reports also face a methodological integration
challenge as the different forms of existing reports, further communication activi-
ties and channels, and the underlying information management and accounting
approaches that provide the reporting information need to be interwoven.
Companies are currently attempting to integrate environmental, social and finan-
cial accounting information in very different ways. Three main sustainability report-
ing strategies can be distinguished:
• Distinctive stakeholder- and theme-specific reports: One reporting strategy is the
publication of a series of different company reports such as environmental
reports, environmental statements, social reports or corporate citizenship reports.