The reporting on sustainability performance indicators : A thesis about the reporting of the Global Reporting Initiative’s sustainability Performance Indicators by the largest Swedish companies of the industrial sector

• Main Authors: Schiehlé, Tristan, Wallin, Jonas
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Företagsekonomi 2014
• Subjects: sustainability; sustainable development; reporting; GRI; Global Reporting Initiative; indicators; industrial; sector; size; Swedish; industrial sector; large companies; measure
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-91004

More and more companies and organizations around the world are aiming towards a sustainable path for their businesses. Pressure from stakeholders and society pushes companies to report on their sustainability performance; however, companies are also seeing the opportunities which arise with these reports and especially large companies are embracing the sustainable path according to prior studies. With an increasing number of sustainability reports produced around the world, the need for measuring the performance indicators within these reports is increasing.With the expansion of sustainability reports among companies, the use of the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) Guidelines becomes a popular framework for companies to adopt. GRI is widely used around the world, as their comprehensive framework includes many performance indicators for companies to report on.It has also been proved that the use of sustainability reports and the number of indicators disclosed in these reports are depending on several criteria among which the size of the company, its sector of activity, and its nationality.As master students studying in Sweden, we considered it would be interesting to know more about the sustainability reporting inside the country we are studying in. Large-size companies tend to disclose use more sustainability reporting and to disclose more information. Some sectors as the industrial sector are in need of sustainability reporting. As no prior studies were found in our search for showing which GRI indicators companies of the industrial sector preferably report on, we decided to embrace the challenge and fill the research gap by conducting a research of large Swedish companies within the industrial sector.This thesis adopted a quantitative approach. We collected data from 30 large Swedish companies within the industrial sector. We also conducted five hypotheses for our analysis in order to make conclusions on our work, and our main findings show that among the Swedish large-size companies belonging to the industrial sector, the largest report more on sustainability using the GRI. Besides, among the large companies which disclose on the GRI the largest disclose on more indicators than the smallest. Finally, we succeeded in identifying indicators of the GRI which are largely and poorly disclosed by the Swedish large-size companies belonging to the industrial sector.