Inter-Firm Comparability of GRI Sustainability Reporting : A study of seven European Companies in the Chemical Sector

Abstract Background: The perceived importance of sustainability has left its mark on organizations. The demand for sustainability reports is growing. The question whether these sustainability reports provide an authentic, or alternatively, an embellished picture of how sustainable a company is, seems interesting. There is no clear definition of what good or bad sustainability would be, and as such, one could argue that companies are considered to be sustainable, or not, depending on other companies in the same industry. The importance of whether sustainability reports are inter-firm comparable rises in compliance with the importance of sustainability itself. This paper attempts to further investigate the inter-firm comparability aspect by using the latest standards from the GRI, namely the GRI Standards that launched in 2016. Purpose: Comparability seems to be a natural way of determining whether a company is sustainable or not. The quality of the sustainability reports therefore diminishes, if the inter-firm comparability between them, is lacking. Hence, the thesis has the purpose of determining whether sustainability reports are inter-firm comparable. Method: This study utilized the GRI database in order to filter and select a population of companies. Seven companies in the European chemical sector were chosen, and a content analysis, where the different firms' responses to 34 selected indicators were analysed and interpreted using the scope of the Stakeholder theory, the Functionalist perspective & the Critical perspective. Conclusion: The inter-firm comparability of the seven companies' sustainability reports, who all used the GRI Standards, was found to be insufficient. This paper adds to previous research which also found inter-firm comparability between sustainability reports conducted according to earlier versions of the GRI framework to be inadequate. The main issues observed were results of differences in how the indicators were answered, sometimes quantitatively, sometimes qualitatively, as well as the amount of superfluous information provided.