Abstract

The article presents a program management approach to the corporate social audit. For widely varying reasons, a number of companies, consultants and academics have embarked on the development of what they consider to be a 'corporate social audit.' Interest in these developments has spread widely and several people have gone so far as to predict that social audit information will be required to supplement financial statements within the next five years. The result of this aroused interest has been an explosion of 'learned essays' on the subject and a series of hastily arranged conferences attended by corporate officers. The purpose of this paper is to bring a little order to the subject, to explain in some detail one concept of the social audit and to place that concept in its proper perspective. The major social audit projects that have been undertaken so far can be grouped into three general categories, the social indicator approach, the constituent impact approach and the corporate rating approach.