“Soft regulating” Social and Sustainability Reporting on the Web: The case of Italy

Standard-setting practices help to create essential voluntary agreements that support the dissemination of knowledge, best practices and monitoring tools. Many national, regional and global actors have asked for more education in standardization. Acknowledging that sustainable development needs common agreements mean that standards are being used to support sustainability purposes. Drawing from these premises, the chapter is aimed to analyse and discuss the rationale, content and benefits of the Italian GBS (Study Group for establishing the Social Reporting Standards) Guidance on social reporting on the web, The new frontiers of social reporting: Web Reporting Guidelines—Research Document (GBS, 2017). Over the years, the GBS has released several research documents that consist of “soft regulation” tools aimed to standardise and improve social and environmental reporting in Italy (GBS Standards and Guidelines). After having introduced the theoretical framework on existing standard on web reporting the work is empirically based and founded on an interventionist research project and an action research approach. Indeed, it describes and analyses the experience of the GBS working group to release the guidance, based on the observation of existing practices and highlighting how organisations can: articulate the web reporting content through a check list; ensure legibility of content, while respecting web usability criteria; develop content profiling by stakeholder categories and interactivity tools to enhance stakeholders dialogue; ensure content reliability and timely information. Findings point out that the web and social networks have profoundly changed the ways organisations adopt in reporting, communicating and managing relationships with their stakeholders and have opened new scenarios in the accountability processes. The web-based reporting experiences at the national level, however, outline an uneven and fragmented picture that, in the absence of clear indications and shared references, may limit the reporting scope or fail to develop the potential of web social and sustainability reporting.