Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
for desirable and expected behaviors, and produce outcomes that are
beneficial to society.
54
Research on GRI and similar reporting frame-
works indicates that they possess numerous characteristics of a global
institution.
55
Some illustrations of this phenomenon include the increas-
ing consensus about what constitutes a high quality sustainability report
and what process should underlie its preparation, the incorporation of
the concept of reporting into the discussions of corporate accountabil-
ity and social responsibility, the emergence of new professions (such as
social investment financial analyst) and new enterprises (consultancies
and think tanks) that depend on sustainability reporting and that spe-
cialize in their preparation and verification, and stabilization of a wide
network of diverse stakeholders, ranging from market analysts to share-
holder activists to labor, civil rights, and environmental organizations,
who have developed a sense of shared enterprise with regard to the
expectation of sustainability reports by companies.
In short, GRI's most salient promise is that it can help create trans-
parency in an early phase of the R&D process, where new GMO prod-
ucts and GMO-based production processes are still under development,
and also create powerful incentives for compliance with emerging codes
of conduct.
The Role for Bounded Sociotechnical Experiments
For controversial technologies with potential adverse consequences for
society, it is wise to conduct small-scale experiments before scaling up
for commercial introduction. The literature on GMOs shows wide sup-
port for pre-market experimentation, both among its proponents and
eds., University of Chicago Press 1991) and W. R. Scott Institutions and Organizations
(Sage 1995).
54
Claus Offe, Designing Institutions in East European Transitions, in
The Theory of
Institutional Design
199-224 (Robert E. Goodin ed., Cambridge University Press
1996). G. Paquet, Governance Through Social Learning (University of Ottawa Press
1999).
55
See Brown et al., note 50; Levy et al., note 50.
