Abstract Background: The perceived importance of sustainability has left its mark on organizations. The demand for sustainability reports is growing. The question whether these sustainability reports provide an authentic, or alternatively, an embellished picture of how sustainable a company is, seems interesting.  There is no clear definition of what good or bad sustainability would be, and as such, one could argue that companies are considered to be sustainable, or not, depending on other companies in the same industry. The importance of whether sustainability reports are inter-firm comparable rises in compliance with the importance of sustainability itself. This paper attempts to further investigate the inter-firm comparability aspect by using the latest standards from the GRI, namely the GRI Standards that launched in 2016.  Purpose: Comparability seems to be a natural way of determining whether a company is sustainable or not. The quality of the sustainability reports therefore diminishes, if the inter-firm comparability between them, is lacking. Hence, the thesis has the purpose of determining whether sustainability reports are inter-firm comparable.    Method: This study utilized the GRI database in order to filter and select a population of companies. Seven companies in the European chemical sector were chosen, and a content analysis, where the different firms' responses to 34 selected indicators were analysed and interpreted using the scope of the Stakeholder theory, the Functionalist perspective & the Critical perspective. Conclusion: The inter-firm comparability of the seven companies' sustainability reports, who all used the GRI Standards, was found to be insufficient. This paper adds to previous research which also found inter-firm comparability between sustainability reports conducted according to earlier versions of the GRI framework to be inadequate. The main issues observed were results of differences in how the indicators were answered, sometimes quantitatively, sometimes qualitatively, as well as the amount of superfluous information provided.

This study aims to analyze and explore the issue of inter-firm comparability of sustainability performance focusing on energy, through the qualitative content analysis of 3 GRI sustainability reports of the retail sector firms. The study examines 3 Swedish retail companies based on data from last year's GRI sustainability reports and focuses exclusively on the energy aspect. The current study provides an answer to the following research question: "Can different companies from the retail industry be compared based on the energy indicator data published in the GRI reports?" In the study, the author analyzes three reports of the retail companies, in particular Kappahl, Lindex, and H&M. For this, the author chose the method of qualitative content analysis. The research process was as follows. From the very beginning, eight keywords were chosen. Three out of eight keywords were excluded. The following keywords remained - energy efficiency, energy consumption, energy use, renewable energy, electricity consumption. Then the textual data was quantified, the visible and the obvious in the text was extracted and described (Results), and thereafter qualitative assessment was made (Discussion and Analysis). To answer this research question, the author had to carefully examine each keyword and category (theme) independently and see if the information about a particular keyword and category (theme) could be compared across different reports. The findings of this study indicate the following. Some of the categories (themes) can be compared, however, not all the categories (themes) are possible to compare. Since not all the categories can be compared, this factor does make overall comparability difficult. Hence, in general, it can be inferred that the GRI energy indicator cannot be compared.