Scoring of Sustainability Reports with GRI-G4 Economic, Environmental, and Social Performance Indicators: A Research on the Companies Preparing Sustainability Report in Turkey

Author(s):  
Abdurrahman Gümrah ◽  
Şükran Güngör Tanç ◽  
Ahmet Tanç
Author(s):  
Yavida Nurim ◽  
Eka Noor Asmara

Since 2002, the Indonesian Government has encouraged listed and unlisted companies to disclose sustainability reports comprised of three performance indicators—economic, environmental, and social—as Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) guidance. The main issue is that different industry characteristics have different orientations of sustainability reporting because of the differences between their main stakeholders. In fact, several GRI criteria do not match every industry characteristic. For example, banking does not report on materials, emissions, or pollution as part of their environmental performance. This research aims to identify the patterns of sustainability reporting from 2015 to 2016, based on industry characteristics. The study compares environmental and social performance reporting patterns of the manufacturing and financial sectors. Results show that manufacturers are more concerned with environmental performance while the financial sector is more concerned with social performance. This evidence contributes to the stakeholder theory and efforts in sustainability report modelling.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 137-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Karcagi-Kováts

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Corporate Sustainability reporting is a relatively new phenomenon in Hungary. As the external pressure from the civil society, public authorities and the media has so far been fairly low, this important corporate activity emerged only at the beginning of the last decade. In spite of this, several pioneering companies have started to publish information on its environmental and social performance in recent years. CSR and sustainability reports are seen increasingly as strategic documents that offer a balanced, objective, and comprehensive assessment of a firm’s non-financial performance. In 2008 and 2009, more than a third of the 100 largest companies reported on their non-financial results (most of them were GRI based reports). In 2010, sixty-one organisations published a report about their non- financial performance, and 22 of these for only the first time. The aim of this paper is to present recent attempts to use indicators in CSR and sustainability reports. On the basis of a detailed review of 70 CSR/sustainability reports published during the last 9 years in Hungary, an analysis was made on the performance indicators appearing in the reports. The motivations of indicator selection processes was analysed and the intended roles of indicator set in communication and strategy design was presented. The significance of and limits to the proposed indicators was discussed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary F. Peters ◽  
Andrea M. Romi

SUMMARY This study provides evidence on whether sustainability-oriented corporate governance mechanisms impact the voluntary assurance of corporate sustainability reports. Specifically, we consider the presence and characteristics of environmental committees on the Board of Directors and a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) among the management team. When examining assurance services, we make a distinction between those services performed by professional accountants, consultants, and internal auditors. We find that the presence of a CSO is positively associated with corporate sustainability report assurance services, and this association increases when the CSO has sustainability expertise. Supporting the position that some firms establish sustainability-related governance merely to conform to socially desired behavior, we find that only those environmental committees containing directors with related expertise influence the likelihood of adopting sustainability assurance. Presently, environmental committees with greater expertise appear to prefer the higher-quality assurance services of professional accounting firms. Expert CSOs, on the other hand, prefer assurance services from their peers with sustainability expertise, as evidenced by their choice to employ consultants. When analyzing firms' environmental contextual characteristics, we find that firms employing a CSO and exhibiting poor environmental performance, relative to other firms in their industry, prefer to report sustainability results without assurance. While we do find that larger firms in the U.S. are significantly less likely to employ assurance, this result decreases over time. Further, we provide initial evidence that the value-relevance of sustainability assurance is increasing with time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nubia Cristina Mapa ◽  
Luiz Claudio Vieira de Oliveira ◽  
Mario Teixeira Reis Neto

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the discursive resources used to sustain and legitimize the reputation of the mining company Samarco Mineração regarding sustainability, before the environmental accident occurred in 2015. Design/methodology/approach The sustainability reports from 2005 to 2014 were accessed for the analysis of the presentation texts, and the discourse analysis method was applied to access the discursive resources employed. Findings From the classical concepts of rhetoric, ethos, pathos and logos, it was found that they reinforced the reputation and legitimacy of the company. The ethos is responsible for the company’s image, while pathos triggers the emotional reception of that image, provoking positive expectations. The logos relate the built image and its emotional reception to a rational discourse that values the company’s expertise. The analysis, in the light of the new rhetoric, exposes the strategies to lead the public to accept the image of solidity and confidence given by a reputation respected nationally and internationally. Research limitations/implications As a limitation, the quantitative data of the report were not analyzed, since the objective was to analyze the discourse construction, understanding that the research was adequate for the established purposes. For the future, it is suggested to analyze the discourse of the company after the environmental accident in order to verify the strategies used in the same theme; analyze the discourses in other reports published in the Global Reporting Initiative model; investigate how the logic of sustainability report construction based on a standard model can interfere in the formation of reputation and legitimacy of the companies; and analyze the impact of CSR on the strategy of the companies. Practical implications The knowledge about the functioning of the language and discourse as an indicative of subjectivity provides a more critical reading and reveals elements implicit in the discourse of the organization. It was verified that the sustainability reports in encapsulated formats allow some stability in the discourse, since companies tend to follow the same line of previous years, even with changes in the organizational structure. Originality/value Discourses built by the companies do not always reflect the true operational and engineering situation practiced by them, and that successful and reputed companies can surprise their stakeholders with events of great magnitude that cause significant losses, be they monetary or human lives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Dwi Indah Lestari ◽  
Merta Noer Vadila

One way to increase corporate awareness and responsibility for the environment can be done through Sustainability reports. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of company size and financial performance on the disclosure of Sustainability Reports on non-financial sector companies listed on the Stock Exchange in 2017-2018 both partially and simultaneously. Company size is measured using total assets while financial performance is measured using the ratio of Return on Assets. This study uses secondary data obtained from the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) and uses an associative descriptive method with a quantitative approach. This research uses purposive sampling method. The results of this study indicate that both partially and simultaneously, company size and financial performance do not significantly influence the disclosure of Sustainability Report elements. Keywords : Sustainability Report, Companies’ size, Financial Performance


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Cho ◽  
Giovanna Michelon ◽  
Dennis M. Patten

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether firms use graphs in their sustainability reports in order to present a more favorable view of their social and environmental performance. Further, because prior research indicates that companies use social and environmental disclosure as a tool to reduce their exposure to social and political pressures (the legitimacy argument), we also examine whether differences in the extent of impression management are associated with differences in social and environmental performance. Based on an analysis of graphs in sustainability reports for a sample of 77 U.S. companies for 2006, we find considerable evidence of favorable selectivity bias in the choice of items graphed, and moderate evidence that where distortion in graphing occurs, it also has a favorable bias. Our results regarding the relation between impression management and performance are mixed. Whereas we find that graphs of social items in sustainability reports for companies with worse social performance exhibit more impression management, no significant relation between environmental performance and impression management in the use of environmental graphs is found. Overall, our results provide additional evidence that corporate sustainability reporting, as it currently exists, appears to be more about fostering positive public relations than providing a meaningful accounting of the social and environmental impacts of the firm.


Author(s):  
Giovanni Bronzetti ◽  
Romilda Mazzotta ◽  
Graziella Sicoli ◽  
Maria Assunta Baldini

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the level and the quality of voluntary disclosures of Intellectual Capital (IC) in the sustainability reports on a sample of Italian listed companies. The authors conducted an analysis of twelve sustainability reports for two years (2009-2010). These are related to six firms selected among the most capitalized 37 Italian listed companies. To investigate the “level of disclosure,” the authors identified the presence of IC information, while to evaluate the “IC quality,” they constructed a voluntary disclosure index based on content analysis. IC information disclosure is more likely present in sustainability reports of firms with a higher levels of application of the Global Reporting Initiative framework. The results confirm that the sustainability report can adequately represent the intellectual capital, especially in order to understand its role in the firm and the interaction with other variables present in the firm.


Author(s):  
Inna Sousa Paiva ◽  
Luísa Cagica Carvalho

Sustainability is a key topic in tourism because this activity uses territory and local resources intensively. Sustainability is considered as a triple bottom line with the three vertices: environmental, social, and economic. Tourism nowadays is an economic and social phenomenon. Even in a period of crisis, tourism has experienced continued growth and widening diversification to become one of the most important sectors in the worldwide economy. Tourism uses more and more digital tools to communicate with stakeholders. This chapter has a twofold purpose: 1) to analyze the disclosure of information provided to stakeholders using digital tools; 2) to compare the sustainability reports provided by a company with the corporate sustainability report guidelines. This chapter uses a qualitative methodology to study the case of the Pestana Group. The Pestana Group is currently the largest Portuguese hospitality group with operations and hotels all over the world, and this case may provide some clues about the use of digital tools to communicate sustainability results to stakeholders.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Demirel ◽  
Murat Erdogan

<p>In recent years, there is a growing focus on corporate operations especially since the publication of the first environmental reports in 1989. Companies have started to publish information about its environmental, social and sustainability policies. The study examines the sustainability reporting elements of Borsa Istanbul Sustainability Index (BIST) in Turkey and to evaluate which elements is most vital in this context. This study will begin with the sustainability reporting that will be examined under the roof of corporation sustainability and end with the examination of sustainability reports of 15 firms, which are included in the BIST Sustainability Index in Turkey, and a content analysis. The reports of companies under study were taken from special web site and GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) database of companies. Being the first study in examining the sustainability report of companies in BIST Sustainability Index, it is expected to contribute in literature about sustainability reporting recently started to gain importance in Turkey. Overall our findings suggest that the sustainability index established in Turkey is still in development stage, but the enterprises in the endeavor are working day by day to develop the sustainability qualities.</p>


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