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summary for reading 4—Whither ecology? The triple bottom line (TBL), the global

reporting initiative (GRI), and corporate sustainability reporting(CSR)

Introduction

There is a growing debate about what and how business leaders, managers and decision

makers can contributed to a transition to ecologically sustainable society. Based on this

debate, this paper firstly discuss the meaning of sustainability reporting and then explores

the role of TBL and GRI in contributing to the sustaining of earth’ s ecology.

Previous literature has done some researches about an ecologically sustainable society,

and this paper will interpret the role of international business and how to promote

sustainable development.

Key point

Facing the growing discourse of business and sustainability, the authors offer alternativeways how businesses may begin to get beyond their TBL in arguing for alternative

processes grounded in organisational ecological literacy, which will mainly discuss

following question:

1. the understanding about sustainability

Sustainability is still a abstract concept and posts some challenges for businesses and

their decision makers, such as the question of wether business decision makers operating

within the constraints of a capitalist system are capable of sacrificing profits to protect

resources and ecosystems.

2.how business has made a sense of sustainability with the idea of TBL

3. what the TBL need

TBL refers to the economic, the social and the environmental, which differs from traditional

reporting, since it includes the concept of ecological and social measurement. However it

is hard to balance equal achievement in these three elements and provide information in

the same extent.

4. how business associations and institutions have encouraged and institutionalised a

particular view of TBL

Four fairly distinctive: multi-agency, consultancies, accounting professions and business

associations.

5. about TBL report

6. what an ecological literacy would demand

Win-win and eco-efficiency. Ecological footprint is more practical, and that means reducingthe size of footprints may lead to improvements in environmental quality.

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Interesting findings and conclusions

1. The notion of TBL still need to developed, when including the ecological.

2. The concept of sustainability is at a system level rather than a organisational level, while

the way that business is organised is inherently unsustainable, therefore, it may difficult to

combining the corporate sustainable and the TBL. Moreover, because nature and ecology

know nothing of our businesses and institution and they cannot adjust themselves to match

modern institutional lines, the only approach is that we learn to reconfigure our way.

Motivation and Contributions

Besides introducing the understanding of sustainability, I think the authors’ motivation was

to improve and promote the TBL reporting and examine the real demand for unsustainableinternational business, contributing to promote sustainable development. Also, this paper

can be helpful for those businesses and decision makers.

Question and challenge

When authors divided discussion part into six sections and examined one question for

each sections, but I fell quite confused about how they proved, because actually I did not

understand the causality between what they wanted to examine and the process they

examine(such as section2).