Managing materiality: a preliminary examination of the adoption of the new GRI G4 guidelines on materiality within the business community

Published date01 August 2016
AuthorPeter Jones,Daphne Comfort,David Hillier
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1586
Date01 August 2016
Commentary
Managing materiality: a preliminary
examination of the adoption of the new
GRI G4 guidelines on materiality within
the business community
Peter Jones
1
*, Daphne Comfort
1
and David Hillier
2
1
The Business School, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
2
Centre for Police Sciences, University of South Wales, Pontypridd, UK
The concept of materiality emerged as the most important element in the new G4 guideline on corporate sustainability
reporting launched by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in 2013. This commentary paper offers a preliminary
examination of the way in which these new guidelines are being adopted within the business community. The paper
begins with a short discussion of the GRI guidelines and the enhanced emphasis on materiality, and the paper draws
its empirical material from the rst 10 companies listed on Google as having published their sustainability reports in
accordance with the G4 guidelines. The ndings reveal marked variations in the ways, and the extent to which, the
selected companies have initially adopted the GR4 guidelines on materiality and that many of the high-priority ma-
terial issues identied by these companies are centred on business continuity rather than environmental sustainability
issues. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
INTRODUCTION
Corporate commitments to sustainability continue
to grow and evolve in importance within the global
business community. McKinsey and Company
(2015), for example, claimed that company leaders
are rallying behind sustainability and executives
overall believe the issue is important to their compa-
nies strategy, while the Ethical Corporation (2015)
suggested that sustainability is becoming a driving
force for businessand that sustainability innova-
tion is the future. That said, sustainability has a
number of contrasting and contested meanings.
Hudson (2005), for example, argued that denitions
of sustainability range from pallid blue green to
dark deep green. The former denition Hudson
(2005) suggests centres on technological xes within
current relations of production, essentially trading
off economic against environmental objectives, with
the market as the prime resource allocation mecha-
nism, while for the latter prioritizing the preserva-
tion of nature is pre-eminent(Hudson, 2005).
Hudson (2005) also suggests that the dominant view
of sustainability is grounded in a blue-green dis-
course of ecological modernizationand claims that
capital accumulation, protable production and eco-
logical sustainability are compatible goals. Further,
he contrasted this view with the deep greenper-
spective that would require signicant reductions
in living standards and radical changes in the domi-
nant social relations of production(Hudson, 2005).
At the same time, it is also important to recognise
that some denitions of corporate sustainability
seem to emphasise business continuity rather than
environmental and social sustainability. Dyllick
and Hockerts (2002), for example, dene corporate
*Correspondence to: Peter Jones, The Business School, University
of Gloucestershire, The Park, Cheltenham GL50 2RH, UK.
E-mail: pjones@glos.ac.uk
Journal of Public Affairs
Volume 16 Number 3 pp 222230 (2016)
Published online 30 September 2015 in Wiley Online Library
(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pa.1586
Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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