The recent study by Boiral and Henri provides recognition to struggles that researchers in academia and ESG analysts at rating agencies are facing when trying to compare sustainability performance of different companies. The paper provides empirical evidence to address incomparability of sustainability performance data. The impossibility of rigorously measuring and comparing the reported sustainability data between companies is examined through content analysis of 92 GRI indicators in 12 sustainability reports of mining firms using GRI’s G3 reporting guidelines.
The research findings are discussed through three different theoretical perspectives; functionalist, critical and postmodern, which all propose different explanations for the results. The functionalist perspective views incomparability as a standardisation and technical issue, the critical as greenwashing and corporate capture, and the postmodernist perspective refers to the concept of sustainability itself and the impossibility of reports to act as means to describe reality. The authors’ choice to discuss the incomparability issue from these three theoretical perspectives is indeed interesting and provides valuable insights to the phenomenon. However, the underlying epistemological assumptions that critical and postmodern perspectives carry are somewhat incongruent with the design of this study. The research question: ‘Is the information on sustainability performance released in the GRI reports of organizations from the same sector of activity really comparable and, if not, for what reasons?’ and the manner in which the research has been carried out resembles most the functionalist approach. Therefore, it seems that the findings as such support mostly the functionalist perspective. Yet, undeniably, including the critical and postmodern perspectives brings more depth to the analysis and contributes to the (in)comparability discussion in a wider context.
Due to these reasons, the main contribution of this paper is not necessarily the theoretical discussion but the main findings as such. The paper presents a detailed analysis of the various reasons explaining incomparability, such as; the unmeasurable nature of the information, unspecific indicators and incomparable measurements and moreover incomplete, opaque and ambiguous data. These findings have implications both for previous and future research. Previous studies, which have attempted to compare sustainability performance by using the reported data on an indicator level, are now seen in a fairly critical light. This paper can inspire a more mature approach to further developments in the field, both inside and outside of academia.