Sustainability Reporting : Insights from Neo-Institutional Theory

The results of KPMG surveys of corporate social responsibility reveal that while, in 1993, 13% of the top 100 companies in 10 countries published a separate report about their environmental and social impacts, this figure almost tripled to 33% (for 16 countries) in the 2005 survey. At the same time casual observation leads to the conclusion that in the nineties “environmental” and/or “health and safety” reports dominated the reporting scene. More recently, however, most companies publish an “environmental and social” or a “sustainability” report. In particular, from the 2002 survey to the 2005 survey, the percentage of separate reports (for the global top 250 companies) that correspond to the label “sustainability” and “social and environmental” have increased from 24% to 85%, with a corresponding decline (from 73% to 13%) for environmental, health and safety reports. These trends are explored in this chapter using the lens of institutional theory to assist our understanding of these large scale shifts in both report production and reporting nomenclature. Questions which arise in this context include: what mechanics underlie the process of the largest corporations moving in the same direction? Why do so many reports evolve in a similar way over such an array of countries, in such different contexts?