ABSTRACT
The Body Shop published the results of its fi rst ‘social audit’ in 1996. This followed its public commitment in 1994 to measure and report on its social performance as a way of holding itself to account and encouraging others to do the same.2 The published report, The Body Shop Social Statement 95, was part of a four-volume set running to over 300 pages that made up the company’s overall ‘Ethical Audit’ for the period, including environmental and animal audit reports and a document describing the method adopted.3 The underlying approach taken by The Body Shop in its social audit was to focus on the interests and perspectives of stakeholders and so measure the company’s performance from that vantage point, at least in part. Stakeholder dialogue was clearly a core element of this approach, without which the relevant data could neither be acquired nor validated. The Body Shop, very keen to adopt the most professional approach possible to avoid accusations of bias or incompetence, invested heavily in creating a highly transparent, systematic method for stakeholder dialogue that included the following:
The bulk of the Social Statement 95’s 134 pages of dense grey text was made up of detailed survey responses, linked to policy statements, indicators, stakeholder quotes, and lastly company responses to the data in the form of commitments signed off by the responsible senior managers. There have been many social reports published since then, both by other companies and by The Body Shop. However, the stakeholder dialogue underlying The Body Shop’s 1996 report remains one of the technically most sophisticated in recent times in terms of its structure and handling of data, and one of the most sensitive in feeding stakeholder concerns into the design of the survey and other dialogue tools.6
