thecontestedpoliticsofcorporategovernance.docVIP

The Contested Politics of Corporate Governance: The Case of the Global Reporting Initiative Paper for Business and Society Special Issue: The Role of Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) in the Business – Government – Society Interface Forthcoming, 2009 David L. Levy, University of Massachusetts, Boston Halina Szejnwald Brown, Clark University Martin de Jong, Technical University of Delft The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has successfully become institutionalized as the preeminent global framework for voluntary corporate environmental and social reporting. Its success can be attributed to the “institutional entrepreneurs” who analyzed the reporting field and deployed discursive, material, and organizational strategies to change it. GRI has, however, fallen short of the aspirations of its founders to use disclosure to empower NGOs. We argue that its trajectory reflects the power relations among members of the field, their strategic choices and compromises, their ability to mobilize alliances and resources, and constraints imposed by the broader institutions of financial and capital markets. We draw three notable implications from this study. First, institutional theory needs to pay more attention to economic structures, strategies, and resources. Second, institutional entrepreneurship by relatively weak societal groups such as NGOs is inherently constrained by the structural power of wider institutions and by the compromises required to initiate change. Third, the strategies of NGOs represent a form of power capable of shifting, if not transforming, the field of corporate governance. The Contested Politics of Corporate Governance: The Case of the Global Reporting Initiative Introduction The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is the preeminent framework for voluntary corporate reporting of environmental and social performance worldwide, and is generally considered to have been very successful since its modest inception in 1999 (Brown, deJong, Lessi