The Relationship between the Adoption of Triple Bottom Line and Enhanced Corporate Reputation and Legitimacy

Triple bottom line (TBL) reporting has been a revolutionary non-financial reporting framework that corporations have certainly accepted into their culture. However, the level of tangible results from TBL reporting is still not evident in the literature or even in corporate reports. The research problem upon which this study is conducted is to investigate the effects of triple bottom line reporting and how it affects the relationship between organizations and their stakeholders, as well as on the reputation of organizations and whether it affects their financial performance. This study has looked at 40 organizations and their sustainability-reporting processes during the period 2009-2010 mainly focusing on their TBL adoption. Corporations constantly mention holism as being an essential part of their sustainability initiatives; TBL seems to be still fostering an economically oriented paradigm in corporations rather than pushing the holistic paradigm, and this claim needs to be justified through interviews conducted. Finally, the level of reputational enhancement that TBL has given corporations needs to be investigated qualitatively. Are organizations adopting TBL primarily to reduce the battering they might take if they do not portray a sense of being socially and environmentally responsible, or do they see a greater benefit from TBL itself? The results from this paper conclude that TBL reporting is a mechanism boosting organizational credentials that input into organizations a cognitive validity, a status boost, and develop their reputation.