Reporting Models for Corporate Sustainability in SMEs

Abstract

Sustainability is one of the biggest challenges in our industrialized societies. It has become an important strategic objective for all companies over the world, trying to keep a dynamic balance of the organizations’ economic, environmental and social performance. Transparency about the organizations’ activities is of great interest for a range of stakeholders. For that reason organizations should maintain a continuous stakeholder dialogue that allows tracking the organizations’ impact along the dimensions of sustainability. The Sustainability Balanced Scorecard and the Global Reporting Initiative provide frameworks that help to identify current shortcomings of financial reports and to recognize the value of intangible assets of the companies. These frameworks have several points in common, they can be supplemented and they support organizations’ efforts to report their performance in terms of sustainability. The objective of this chapter is to present a new approach to handle the integration of these frameworks, allowing organizations to better manage strategies, provide communication with stakeholders, and made clear by the case of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs).