Corporate sustainability assessment methodology

Sustainability is a vague concept specifically in the context of a corporate world. There are numerous definitions for corporate sustainability and just as many ways of evaluating it. This work attempts to define, structure and assess corporate sustainability in a standardized robust manner through development of a comprehensive framework. The framework is developed based on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines to serve as a common measure system allowing for meaningful assessment of current state and comparison between companies in a variety of industries. Based on this framework and earlier developed Sustainability Assessment by Fuzzy Evaluation (SAFE) model a quantitative method is developed in MATLAB code. The new method is demonstrated on five companies within software industry through evaluation of publicly available data. The outcome of the evaluation is a relative ranking of companies with respect to economic, social and environmental aspects as well as intermediate components of each. Additionally high impact components, which have the potential to improve the ranking outcome the most, are identified for one of the companies as an example of practical application of such assessment. Evaluation of these components could serve as a base for recommendations development of further management action on improving of company's sustainability.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Pinchuk, Natallia

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sarah Slaughter and Daniel Whitney.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Mechanical Engineering.
• Leaders for Global Operations Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66056

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/66056