ABSTRACT
The analysis of financial performance undertaken in chapter 5 was shown to be of limited statistical validity from the point of view of drawing any conclusions about differences between industry sectors. Nevertheless the analysis does indicate that the water sector is different from the food sectors but that there does not seem to be a great difference between the food manufacturing and food retailing sectors. The analysis also shows considerable differences between companies in each sector but also that the water sector appears more homogenous than the other two sectors. This situation also appears to be the case from an analysis of environmental performance, or at least the reporting of such performance, as also undertaken in chapter 5.1
The question therefore arises as to what makes the water industry different from the other two industrial sectors to such an extent that both the returns to shareholders and the reporting of environmental performance can be demonstrated to be significantly different. It is of course possible that the nature of the operational efficiency of this industry is such that the firms can make a higher level of profit, and hence returns to shareholders in this industry. Such an argument does not however apply to any consideration of environmental performance. Indeed it would be reasonable to suppose that the two dimensions of performance are actually diametrically opposed to one another, and this is part of the message of the semiotic as created by the authors of the script. It would therefore be expected that good performance in one dimension could only be achieved
at the expense of good performance in the other. It would appear, on the basis of the analysis in the preceding chapters, that this is not in fact the case. Indeed it appears that good performance by a company leads to good performance in both dimensions. In order to test this assertion therefore it is necessary to examine the correlation between performance in both dimensions.
