Standardizing Social Sustainability in ESG Reporting

Corporate sustainability, or environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) reports provide a standardized method for investors to gauge a company’s goals and climate initiatives – but these reports have also been criticized in recent years as tools for greenwashing. While the reports create valuable opportunities for dialogue, a lack of consistency in reporting strategies, and the tendency for companies to portray their efforts positively, have been met with significant backlash.

The topic of social sustainability, in particular, is vague and unstandardized in these ESG reports. To tackle this, a team of MIT researchers created a rubric for understanding how corporations use social sustainability concepts in reports. In their new white paper entitled A Taxonomy for Social Sustainability in Corporate Communication, Amelia Dogan, Research Affiliate in the MIT Data + Feminism Lab; Laura Frye-Levine, Research Scientist at MIT Anthropology; and Ava Malysa, an undergraduate Research Assistant at the MCSC, analyze the narrative sections from six corporate sustainability reports and propose an initial taxonomy of constitutive social sustainability concepts reflected in corporate speech. Through this analysis, they developed a codebook to help document, streamline, and standardize how companies are talking about social sustainability.