ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how organisations engagement stake-holders in social auditing through a comparative analysis of social auditing processes and reports from five different organisations. The organisations include the Agency for Personal Service Overseas, The Co-operative Bank, British Telecom, Shared Earth and Vancouver City Savings Credit Union. The heart of the problem with stakeholder theory has been the identification or differentiation of the 'stake', or 'interest', of each stakeholder in an organisation. Social auditing is an activity that recognises an obligation incumbent on organisations to give an account of their social performance to their legitimate stakeholders. Core principle of agency for personal service overseas social auditing methodology was to include the input from all types of stakeholders into the process of identifying the criteria against which the organisation's performance would be measured. The polyvocal citizenship perspective and the dialogue approaches require the issue of identification of 'stakeholders' or 'citizens' to be addressed, particularly the issue of their representation.
