Clem Seecharan. Ian Randle Publishers. 696 pages. Paperback. £25.95
This
lengthy but illuminating book is not likely to be on any recognized CSR
reading list, but it probably should be. The author, Clem Seecharan, is
a professor of Caribbean history and no expert on corporate
responsibility. But the real-life subject he tackles – a sugar
company’s struggle to make itself more socially responsible in the
postwar West Indies – is the kind of thing we should have more of in
CSR literature.
The company in question – Booker, which is now
more famous for its past sponsorship of the Man Booker Prize for
Fiction – engineered a spectacular turnaround in its social performance
in the South American colony of British Guiana (now Guyana) after the
Second World War. Much of this was due to the extraordinary commitment
and vision of the company’s chairman, Jock Campbell, whose life and
works are the focus of this scholarly but passionate work.
Driven
by the spectre of his family firm’s historical involvement in slavery
and the horrendous conditions he found on its Guyanese sugar
plantations, Campbell set about using his leadership of the company to
right the wrongs of the past. Workers’ wages were vastly increased,
slave barracks that still served as worker homes were replaced by
15,000 new houses with drinking water supplies, free medical facilities
were created for employees and their families, and the company built
community centres, sports clubs and libraries while handing over almost
half of its land to co-operatives for farming. In a groundbreaking move
that was to have ramifications for the rest of the world, the company
also sponsored the work of the great Italian doctor George Giglioli,
who did much to eradicate malaria in the country. As a result of
Campbell’s measures, Booker sugar production all-but doubled during his
tenure.
Seecharan’s detailed and engaging account of these
dramatic changes shows the potential in every company for engineering
social change. Yet it also illuminates the limits of corporate
responsibility. Booker’s gains were many, but in the end they were
neutered by the chaotic pre- and post-independence politics of Guyana,
demonstrating that without a supportive societal framework, CSR can
easily wither on the vine.
Peter Mason
