Internalizing The Philosophy
The triple bottom line is emerging as a popular conceptualization and reporting vehicle for articulating corporate social, environmental, and economic performance and is receiving significant attention in connection with its efficacy and sufficiency as a means for reporting the extent to which an organization meets its societal and environmental responsibilities. The concept of TBL demands that a company's responsibility be to 'stakeholders' rather than shareholders.
The paper talks about the bottom line metaphor as it applies to the social and environmental aspects of a business organization and describes the resource and information flow between the three components viz. people, planet and profits in details.
It then captures various representation followed by different corporates, governments and consultants worldwide. It lists down Assessment Methodologies like Qualitative, Quantitative, Absolute and Relative indicators for Triple bottom line. The paper identifies convergence, strong social obligation and transparency among others as reasons for companies to report additional bottom lines.
It then describes TBL concept as prevalent in India. It finds that corporates like Aditya Birla Group, Wipro, Dr Reddy among many others have already started publishing annual sustainability reports with triple bottom line. The paper then takes on cases of ITC and Aravind Eye Hospital and finds out ways in which these organisations are enriching their respective bottom line components.
The paper also talks about some of the arguments that are against the TBL concept. Some of them are companies’ deviation from the core competency of profit making, its ineffective in poor societies, conversion of social and environmental factors to monetary values among others.
We conclude that the bottom line as a metaphor for measuring and reporting business’ contribution to social and environmental sustainability is fatally flawed due to three main...
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