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Introduction
Corporate sustainability has been the subject of research interest in the social sciences since the mid-1900s. The research focused on how sustainability can safeguard the well being of human population and protect the environment from unregulated production activities resulting in pollution and resource degradation. Sustainability reporting evolved in the mid-1990s as a means for business organizations to manage and balance their productive efforts with those of the environment and their surrounding communities. The collective and multidisciplinary research efforts resulted in the implementation of accounting methods that record and report triple bottom line (TBL) results. TBL measurement and reporting, however, is at the initial stage of development and has not yet achieved full standardization and enforcement by the accounting standards setting organizations.
This paper traces the evolution and progress of corporate sustainability development efforts that resulted in the establishment of "sustainability indicators" published by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index ([10] DJSI, 2009) World and the Global Reporting Initiative ([13] GRI, 2009) Reporting Framework. Though both instruments/indexes address the same issues, we argue that they employ different disclosure methods. Accordingly, these different disclosure formats call for reporting standardization and enforcement.
Historically, corporate sustainability has evolved as a result of economic growth, environmental regulation-stewardship, and a push for social justice and equity. However, something more extraordinary has occurred. There emerged global interest among industry, governments, and non-government organizations to collaborate to develop methods for sharing responsibility and respecting the laws that preserve and maintain the environment and its natural resources. In addition, the recent turmoil in the financial and capital markets resulted in a worldwide government cooperation to end "the age of irresponsibility[1] ."
The environmental pollutions of the industrialized era and the discovery of toxic waste dumps, such as Love Canal and Times Beach, led to the establishment of the landmark Superfund law for cleanup, in 1980[2] . Several other environmental disasters occurred in the past, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. They include: the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in Russia, the Kuwait oil-well fires during the Gulf War, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A recent survey conducted by GlobeScan for the University of Maryland's...