Corporate Social Indices: Refining the Global Reporting Initiative

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we demonstrate that the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards do not enable stakeholders to compare the relevant social performance of different organizations. We argue that the GRI Standards are based on a misguided claim about informed decision-making, which does not fully respect the conceptual difference between transparency and comparability. Secondly, we demonstrate that it is possible to improve the GRI Standards by incorporating a set of social indices which can be compared cross-organizationally. The inspiration for this framework is found in the UN’s Human Development Index and Sen’s capability approach.