Global Reporting Initiative
GRI mission is “to elevate sustainability reporting practices to a level equivalet to those of
financial reporting, while achieving comparability, credibility, rigour, timeliness, and
verifiability of reported information.” (GRI, 2002: 65) These achievements mentioned in
the mission statement became a platform for researchers to investigate in. Literature
regarding GRI strongly focus on analyzing the comparability of GRI reports as well as the
extent to which corporations are reporting the principles. Further, analysis concerning GRI
Guidelines are rare and only mentioned when it comes to the progress of the initative or
the usage. Thus far, there is less evidence on profound analysis concerning the variety or
lack of guidelines.
D. Etzion and F. Ferraro (2007) analyzed the GRI Guidelines with respect to ambiguity
reduction, discourse briding and robust design; illustration of these results in appendix
Figures 1 and 2. The results of their study is that “GRI Guidelines act at three levels:
demarcating the social ideals which provide the impetus for changes; addressing them as
part of the business dicourse; and codifying the technigque for approprate organizational
action (Hasselbaldh & Kallinikos, 2000).” Furthermore, D. Etzion and F. Ferraro (2010)
identify that GRI is closely aligned and embedded in business which on one hand can lead
to acceptance whereas substantial change is generated more difficult. This result has been
researched by D. Etzion and F. Ferraro (2010) where the “analysis shows that GRI first
emphasized the similarity between sustainability reporting and financial reporting in order
to gain legitimacy; over time, however, it reduced the extent to which it employed the
analogy, emphasizing not just similarity, but also dissimilarities
and incongruence with financial reporting.” (p. 1093)
J. E. Morhardt et.al. (2002) evaluated the “extent to which current voluntary corporate
environmental reports meet the requirements of two new sets of guidelines: (i) the Global
Reporting Initiative GRI 2000 sustainability reporting guidelines and (ii) the ISO 14031
environmental performance evaluation standard.” (p. 215) The scoring system used to
analyze the GRI was based on following categories: “General organizational features
(CEO statement,
Organizational profile, Key indicators, Vision and strategy, Policies, organization and
management systems), Environmental performance metrics, Economic performance
metrics, Social performance metrics” (J. E. Morhardt et.al., 2002, p. 222) Further, J. E.
Morhardt et.al. (2002) selected the environmental reports by identifying four industrial
sectors with each 10 companies from the Fortune Global 500 list (30 January 2000). The
result on this research is “the fact that the current environmental reports of 40 of the
