Corporate Responsibility and Strategic Groups in the Forest-based Industry: Exploratory Analysis based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Framework

A growing number of large forest industry companies have declared voluntary adoption of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines to avoid the lack of verification in reporting and to alleviate current criticisms of corporate responsibility (CR) practices. In this study, we use quantitative multivariate analysis of CR disclosure data (GRI indicators) from 66 forest industry firms. The results from cluster analysis show that 58% of the major companies in forest-based industries are following what could be called a relatively defensive approach to CR, while companies proactive towards CR represent only a minority of the sample (18%), and one-quarter of the companies could be classified as being stuck-in-the-middle in terms of CR. CR practices are found to run parallel to and beyond core business activities, number of employees, sales, and production in these three strategic groups. However, no strategic group level differences in terms of the location of headquarters or financial performance were found. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.