Corporate Responsibility in the UK Construction Industry: a Study of Activities and Reporting
Corporate Responsibility in the UK Construction Industry: A Study of Activities and Reporting James Daniel Brown, BSc, PgDip. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2012 Abstract Corporate Responsibility (CR) defines the process of self-regulation, whereby an organisation seeks to measure and improve its performance related to the social, environmental and economic expectations placed upon it by society. In the past two decades the prominence, and therefore uptake of CR activities and reporting has increased across many sectors. The pace of this change has varied significantly, with many industries quickly becoming aware of its importance and integrating it into their business operations while others have seen CR as lower priority and have been much slower to embrace it. In the UK, while some of the individual components of CR are governed by legislation (e.g. environmental activities and health & safety), others such as social interactions and CR reporting have little or no legislation associated with them. This lack of any clear legislative requirements effectively allows organisations to report on any topics they wish and results in a very varied approach to implementing and reporting upon the subject. While some aspects of CR, such as reporting (Jones, Comfort et al. 2006), performance benchmarking (BITC, Graafland et al (2003)) and attitudes to CR (Herridge, (2003), Petrovic- Lazarevic, (2008)) have been investigated in isolation, there has been no attempt to provide a holistic view of the industry. This research seeks to do just that by combining a range of data in an effort to build a broad evidence base of the industry‟s reporting practices, performance and perceptions of the industry with regards to CR.
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