With a better networked community, corporate processes and responsibilities that were once opaque are now much more vulnerable to scrutiny. Before now it simply would not have been possible to create a social sustainability profile of any company. But that the climate change age will impose ever increasing requirements for transparency on the part of business is inevitable.
A social sustainability profile is the outcome of a collaboratively driven internet research activity that aims to identify all the impacts a company’s conduct of its business imposes on the climate and environment. This applies both in the ways it makes its money – and in the nature of the activities of those it makes it from – and how it spends it. There are implications for its total environmental footprint in both directions and quite often they are not obvious at first glance.
Essentially, in conducting a social profile, the best guide is to follow the money. If the target is a publicly listed company, this makes it easier to identify from its annual report all the different ways in which it generates profit, often through several revenue lines.
Each revenue line has a "business model" – the package of discrete management activities that turns the wheel of the profit machine. A single business may have many ways of making money, generally related in some way, but each has its own specific mode of managerial execution.
The operation of a specific business model may itself have several divisions and departments charged with its conduct. And all organisations have people who make decisions, and in charge of each of its business models is likely to be a team of executives that decides how it is to be run and what are the necessary undertakings it must commit to that will optimise profit.
It is in these people's hands that responsibilities for that business's responses to environmental depletion and climate change lie. Each will play a different role in creating its environmental footprint.
A social sustainability profile is intended therefore not only to identify where a company’s impacts come from but who controls the decisions in the business relationships from which they emerge.
The creation of a profile will rest on the inventiveness of its contributors in identifying and drawing out the individuals and their connections who can contribute the insights and information which brings it to existence.
Once drawn, the social sustainability profile makes clear where its creators expect to see improvements made in the environmental undertakings of the target company.
