Social/Environmental Reporting: Can it Help to Change the World?

While social/environmental reporting (SER) is lauded as a way for business organisations to voluntarily effect some transition towards sustainable development, doubt persists about the extent to which current practice is enabling this. In this paper, Colin Higgins reports on two recent research projects that explore techniques that businesses use to resist change, as well as how external drivers influence organisational activities. Stakeholders interested in encouraging change, such as towards a greater degree of responsiveness to Indigenous issues, need to target more specifically innovative companies and also the arguments used to justify social/environmental initiatives