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Numbers or Stories When you hit that quadrennial quirk in the calendar, February 29, what happens to the bottom line - meaning the dominant economic one? Harry Levins, St Louis Today Post Dispatch's senior writer asked whether this extra day in the year - equating numerically to almost three-tenths of 1 percent - would nudge up economic stats.19 Would it appear not just on the calendar but also on America's bottom line - in its gross domestic product, which measures the value of goods and services produced in the United States? Apparently not, these aberrations get smoothed by the statisticians. Bottomlines - in the financial sense - do have some meaning however as there is some agreed state of bottom-ness: that telltale 0 integer between profit and loss. Whether any agreed state of bottom-ness exists between positive and negative social and environmental impact is far less clear. This year though, all things considered, with an extra day at our disposal, any educated person could conjecture an even greater negative impact on society and the planet. Social construction through and through, the bottom line concept is amenable to considerable stretching, with businesses engaging with it self-proclaimed heroes despite their individual and collective impacts being on the wrong side of the ledger. The concept of the Triple Bottom Line20 still has quite a bit of traction in popular understandings of sustainability and sustainable development. At the very least, it reminds punters to include social equity and ecological concerns in the management mix of businesses - and increasingly, though by no means completely, to report on measures of performance other than just financial ones. What the triple bottom line means beyond this is up for debate, however. On the academic front, Wayne Norman and Chris McDonald published a useful critique of the Triple Bottom Line in Business Ethics Quarterly21. The authors remind us that the ideas behind the TBL concept are not new - obligations to stakeholders have long been talked about if not universally accepted; rather they contend it is the measuring, calculating auditing and reporting on them that yields an exciting promise. Promise, yes. Fully explicated and easy to implement? No to the first question, and no again to the second, unless the concept of triple bottom line falls prey to being what Norman and McDonald call a "Good old-fashioned Single Bottom Line plus Vague Commitments to Social and Environmental Concerns" - that is business-as-usual flavoured with bottom line rhetoric. Norman and McDonald point out that there is an implicit claim in the TBL concept that social (and environmental) performance can be measured and reported on in similar ways to financial performance. And that so doing, that is buying into social obligations and transparency as key business mantra adds up to more profitable business in the long run. That these authors, though they are sympathetic with the idea of many socially responsible business practice, can have a field day in laying bare the fallacies in these arguments should be obvious. Briefly as readers will likely be aware, there are all sorts of problems with measuring and monetarising social impacts - and being open about all these issues all the time (if indeed possible or seen as desirable by stakeholders) may not necessarily end up ringing the tills. Taken to the extreme, where can uncritical adoption of flawed concepts lead? New Zealand's National Business Review22 featured three large female bottoms in an article entitled 'The Expanding Bottom Line', lambasting the concept's uncritical uptake and noting that "pressure to measure up as a good corporate citizen is driving some companies to outlandish acts". The article cited ailing insurer AMP's announcement that it was going into the tree-planting business to mitigate the effects of its million 550 page information memoranda required to explain the Australian company's split into two. Terry McCrann in Australia's Herald Sun was cited responding to the initiative as offsetting the environmental damage done to Australia: "It would be better for AMP to focus on running the business well and not doing damage to the financial environment of its shareholders". Uncritical adoption of the TBL takes us full circle - back to providing fodder for critics of corporate citizenship. However, some enlightened companies, our leading reporters have fortunately gone beyond the TBL rhetoric - and indeed hardly refer at all to it in their latest reports. The ACCA UK Awards for Sustainability Reporting23 announced as best in the sustainability reporting category, The Co-operative Bank plc, with Shell International as runner up. The TBL concept is implicit rather than explicit in The Co-operative Bank's: Sustainable Development Partnership Report 200224 (the latest on its website). Translating the TBL elements to 'delivering value, social responsibility and ecological sustainability' as an effective overview, the report focuses more on a partnership approach - 'moving forward together', noting the importance of trust and its external ratings in that respect, as well as its impacts on various stakeholder categories. The Shell Report 200225 (the latest on the Royal Dutch/Shell Group's website) owes more to its historical ties with the proponent of TBL, John Elkington, with economic performance, environmental performance and social performance strongly headlined, and focused around 11 key performance indicators whose lineage is traced, allowing for some comparability between years at least. Beyond that, though, we get contextualised reporting in light of the energy challenge, and what the Shell Report calls "in-depth case studies on some of the most important issues or site level challenges". This "qualitative hot spot reporting is important to give a meaningful picture of our performance" and features community development in Nigeria, refineries in South Africa, resettlement at the Nanhai Petrochemicals complex, and animal testing.
Indeed, following the theme of room for improvement, we note there are a number of metaphors present in the discourse around sustainability reporting and in the reports themselves which present sustainability as a learning experience for those businesses embarking upon it, and as what progressive (and progress-oriented) businesses do. The sustainability-as-a-journey metaphor is a potent one that enables businesses to embark on activities that might lead towards enhanced sustainability, or indeed, diminished unsustainability, but equally might not in the absence of some serious thinking about the concept. 20. Elkington, J. 1997. Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. London: Capstone. 21. Norman, W. & MacDonald, C. 2003. Getting to the bottom of Triple Bottom Line. Business Ethics Quarterly. 22. Stride, N. 24th October, 2003. The expanding triple bottom line. National Business Review, Auckland, pp. 18-19. 23. ACCA 24th February, 2004. Global accountancy body awards UK voluntary reporters. Press release. www.acca.org.uk/news/releases/1099682?session=fffffffeffffffffc28288ca40426c7d4852a6332b51fa0bfa71aee1ecbdbceb 24. The Co-operative Bank, 2002. Sustainable Development Partnership Report. www.co-operativebank.co.uk/ethics/partnership2002/pr/index.html 25. Royal Dutch/Shell Group, 2002. The Shell Report 2002. www.shell.com/home/Framework?siteId=shellreport2002-en 26. ACCA 24th February, 2004. Global accountancy body awards UK voluntary reporters. Press release. www.acca.org.uk/news/releases/1099682?session=fffffffeffffffffc28288ca40426c7d4852a6332b51fa0bfa71aee1ecbdbceb
contents © Greenleaf Publishing, apart from the Introduction © jem bendell, 2005. site by waywardmedia.com
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Andrew Harding, Executive Director of ACCA UK, said they were "pleased to have received so many strong entries for this year's UK Awards which recognise that sustainability reporting helps all stakeholders to gauge non-financial risk and identify poor performance. If used properly, non-financial reporting also helps organisations to control weaknesses and minimise the risk of ethical misconduct. There is, however, a long way to go. Many more organisations should be reporting in this way and those that do still have room for improvement."
Without businesses defining the destination of their respective sustainability journeys, businesses might miss out on the essence of what sustainability could mean for them. For some with an inherently unsustainable business model, perhaps defining sustainability in their case is just too scary as they simply would not be in business any more without substantive and real change. Reporting on the small steps is far easier as we noted above - but whether we will achieve sustainability with multitudes of small steps and without radical and fundamental change is doubtful. Hence interesting insights can be gained by critically analysing the discourse of corporate sustainability reports in terms of the paradoxes it contains, a project that co-author of this review Kate Kearins is taking forward with fellow New Zealand academics Markus Milne and Sara Walton.