The article in the url below draws an instructive distinction between a socially responsible company and an ethical company. The author is not objective (he is writing for the Institute of Global Ethics’ newsletter Ethics Newsline), but that does not diminish the value of the conversation. In short, the author conceptualizes CSR as a subset of the broader idea of ethics:
“Responsibility … is one of five distinct core values that define, globally, the idea of ethics. A necessary but not sufficient condition for ethics, it needs to be fleshed out by the other four values: honesty, respect, fairness, and compassion. Ethics requires all five. So can an individual or a corporation have a strong sense of responsibility without necessarily being honest? Yes. The opposite can also arise, where a deeply honest person proves to be irresponsible. These are two big, different ideas.”
Partly, this characteristic of being more than one thing at once reflects the complexity of modern corporations. No firm is either all-good or all-bad and any means of measuring CSR that suggests otherwise is not sufficiently subtle to be of value.
It is the author’s broader argument, however, that is stimulating. While I am not wholly convinced of the details (and the reader comments at the bottom of the webpage raise some good points), the article is meaningful on a deeper level. Implicitly, the author is taking aim at the superficial nature of much of the work firms refer to as CSR, but he is also questioning the ability of the CSR community to validate that work. This explains why firms like Enron and BP can be heralded by the CSR community as examples of ‘best-practice’ organizations, only to be later exposed as unethical (non-CSR) firms in reality. Whenever a third party attempts to evaluate a firm, they are liable to some degree of obfuscation or distortion:
“Of course corporate responsibility attracts customers. Of course it is good business. And of course it must be fully ethical. They must not only do the right things (which is CR) but do things right (which is ethics). Increasingly, customers are demanding both. Look for smart CR companies to make this connection quickly and bring the two together.”
Greenwashing is a label that has become too-easily thrown around, but it speaks to a core problem within CSR—the ability of stakeholders to define and measure what we think of as responsible behavior in a way that allows comparisons across organizations. The answer is easy to conceptualize and difficult to implement. First, we need to find a way to assess accurately those firms that are genuinely conducting business in a way that is qualitatively different to those firms that are simply using CSR to sell more products; then, we need to educate the firm’s stakeholders to differentiate among these firms in ways that reward the firms that most constructively contribute to social value, broadly defined.
Both steps are essential to ensure sufficient, meaningful change.
Take care
David
Instructor Teaching Site: http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr/
The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: http://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/
Why Corporate Social Responsibility Needs Ethics
By Rushworth M. Kidder
October 3, 2011
Institute for Global Ethics: Ethics Newsline
