ABSTRACT
John Elkington's Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business (1997) offers an inspiring metaphor that challenges contemporary corporations to simultaneously deliver the triple bottom line (TBL) of economic prosperity, environmental quality and social equity. Why corporations? Hart (1997) argues that while the roots of the world's sustainability crisis are social and political, only corporations have the resources, global reach and motivation to achieve sustainability. Corporations now represent over half of the world's largest economies (Anderson and Cavanagh, 1996, quoted in Zadek, 2001) and sales of the top 200 corporations equate to one quarter of the world's economic activity (Wheeler and Sillanpää, 1997, quoted in Zadek, 2001). In this chapter, we review the literature considering the development of the TBL concept and the reasons for its increasing prominence on the business agenda. We consider the development of the TBL concept both as a management tool and a reporting tool.
