Transparency in social reporting requires companies to acknowledge the bad as well as the good, argues Adrian Henriques
At a conference just before the invasion of Iraq I asked the question
‘What is the corporate responsibility of a company in a time of war?’.
The panel of eminent business people responding acknowledged that it
was a significant question, but they did not have an answer. This is
strange because for ordinary citizens, the corresponding question
(‘What is my responsibility in a time of war?’) was in one form or
another a topic of very lively debate at every level of society.
Is it reasonable to talk about companies in the language in which
individual responsibilities are discussed? Or is it taking an analogy
too far? Aren’t companies merely legal fictions? Yet if so, they are
some of the most powerful fictions on the planet.
There
are many pointers to the reality of the fiction. Companies in most
jurisdictions are legal persons; they have places of residence; they
occasionally have a vote – for example in the City of London; at least
in Europe they have human rights under the law, and in the US the Kasky
v Nike debate has revolved around whether they also have free speech
under the constitution.
So while corporate social
responsibility and corporate citizenship practice borrow freely from
the elevated discourse of ethics, it cannot escape the grittier
language of moral debate. If corporate citizenship is to be more than
the cuddly offspring of campaigning and community good works, then
issues of right and wrong have to be addressed. Of course it is rather
easier to address the issue of being right than of being wrong. It is
easier to claim responsibility for an impressive community project than
to acknowledge that you have blighted lives, perhaps through some
accident.
One consequence of imbalanced accounts of
company activities is that social reports are seen as ‘merely PR’. If
major statements of a company’s responsibilities are one-sided, then
all its statements lose credibility.
What seems to be
happening is that companies are attempting to be entirely ‘good’. So
where does all the bad go? It is largely projected onto others:
campaigners, extremists, dreamers. The result is a polarization of
opinion. Conflict becomes more likely. Campaigning non-governmental
organizations may re-double their efforts to embarrass companies. The
recent Friends of the Earth social report written ‘on behalf’ of Shell
illustrates this point.
It is easier to fight than to
acknowledge that part of the blame for a situation is one’s own fault.
Yet from selling arms to supporting a just cause, every company has
reason to be involved in such debates. Or will they claim the right to
be silent?
Adrian Henriques is professor of
corporate social responsibility at Middlesex University in the UK, and
director of Just Assurance, a social auditing organization. [email protected]
