A Discourse Ethical Perspective on Social Accounting— The Case of the “Global Eight”

Since the turn of the century, social accountability has become a growing area in the field of business ethics (

Gray 2002

);

2001

;

O’Dwyer 2001

;

Unerman/ Bennett 2004

;

Rasche/Esser 2006

. Particularly in the international context there has been a proliferation of different concepts providing multinational corporations (MNCs) with ways to systematically assess, measure, and communicate their social and ethical performance (

Donaldson 2003

);

Göbbel/Jonker 2003

;

Mathews 1997

;

McIntosh et al. 2003

;

Tulder/Kolk 2001

;

Zadek et al. 1997

. For the most part, so-called social accounting standards have gained momentum over the last couple of years. In her review, (

2003

) identifies 32 tools that help firms to cope with the increasing demand for transparency and engage in “

social and ethical accounting, auditing, and reporting

” (SEAAR, hereafter also simply referred to as “social accounting”). The most well-known examples among these SEAAR standards are the so-called “Global Eight” (

McIntosh et al. 2003

): (1) the UN Global Compact, (2) the ILO Conventions, (3) the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, (4) the ISO 14001 series, (5) the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), (6) the Global Sullivan Principles, (7) Social Accountability 8000 (SA 8000), and (8) Account Ability 1000 (AA 1000).