A Study on Key Issues by Major Industries through Criticality Assessment: From the GRI Perspective

Abstract

In the past, companies focused on growth-oriented, or "shareholder capitalism" management, with the aim of maximizing profits, but through the 4th Industrial Revolution and the COVID-19 era, they are shifting to "stakeholder capitalism" that recognizes the protection and safety of human resources as a top priority. Companies select key issues through the interest and business impact of various stakeholders, which is called criticality evaluation. The importance evaluation in the annual sustainability report can be seen as a management strategy to increase corporate competitiveness by prioritizing key issues. This study selected the construction industry, transportation and warehouse industry, and manufacturing industry as representative industries, and extracted key issues in the criticality evaluation of 134 sustainability reports from five companies. Key keywords were selected from the GRI perspective through the extracted issues, and frequency analysis and weight analysis by industry were conducted. In the construction industry, "customers" of product responsibility and "eco-friendly" of the environment were high in frequency analysis. In the transportation and warehouse industries, the frequency of "Employment" of labor and "social" of society was high. In the manufacturing industry, "products" of product responsibility and "partner company" of society showed high frequency. As a result of the weight analysis, the environment was the highest in all three industries, with the construction industry having the highest "economy," the transportation warehouse industry having the highest "society," and the manufacturing industry having the highest "product." Through this, it was confirmed that the characteristics of each industry and the analysis results were consistent. Through this study, it will be basic academic and practical data by recognizing the importance of criticality evaluation in terms of corporate management strategies, identifying key issues of various stakeholders and business impact, and comparing them by industry.