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A Critical Analysis of Sustainability Reporting In the Automotive Industry

  • Abstract: The VW emissions scandal uncovered significant deficiencies in the sustainability performance of numerous automotive producers. This raised the question, whether sustainability reporting still reflects the real-life sustainability performance in the automotive industry. If sustainability reporting was transparent and honest, the tone of the reports should have been a more critical one in recent years. To test this, a quantitative and a qualitative study were conducted. While in the quantitative study, it was analyzed in which way automotive producers present themselves in their sustainability reports, the qualitative study focused on their real-life sustainability deficiencies. The results suggest that on an industry level, sustainability reporting widely fails as an indicator of real-life sustainability. All companies presented their sustainability actions in a highly positive way, although more than two thirds of them were involved in sustainability scandals. However, this result cannot be exactly confirmed on a company level. While the average relationships are weak, they still rather suggest that those companies which present themselves in the most positive way tend to perform the best and vice versa. Since this only reflects the relative differences in the companies’ selfpresentation, it hardly contradicts the main finding of the study: Sustainability Reporting as it is used in today’s automotive industry rather serves embellishment than transparency purposes.

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Metadaten
Author:Denise Schumacher
URN:urn:nbn:de:kobv:b721-opus4-8609
Document Type:Master's Thesis
Language:English
Date of first Publication:2017/01/06
Publishing Institution:Hochschulbibliothek HWR Berlin
Granting Institution:Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht Berlin
Release Date:2017/01/06
Page Number:66
Institutes:FB I - Wirtschaftswissenschaften