The respective roles of business, government and civil society are becoming less clearly demarcated, says David Boyle
It isn’t easy being a CSR professional these days. I’m not one myself,
but I can guess. My campaigning contacts speak moralistically about
corporate hypocrisy – and my business media contacts hint that CSR has
a certain irrelevance. But of course, in public, each says what
important pioneering work this is.
There is a disconnect between CSR-speak, with all those metrics and
reporting compacts, and the real problems of the world. There is an
uneasiness about CSR delivered by companies whose central activity –
oil, nuclear, mega-supermarkets, airports – seems to point in the
opposite direction. But this unease feeds into trends that look set to
shift the debate in fascinating ways.
First, the critical relationship between campaigners and corporations
has changed. There is no longer a great gulf between the two worlds.
The front line is now somewhere in the boardrooms of the corporate
world, and the real contest is being played out there.
CSR professionals have to look increasingly inward to their own
company, while campaigners look to them to battle on their behalf. For
the campaigners, this dependence on insiders may feel like compromise,
but it’s a sign that their arguments have gone deep.
Second, the struggles are increasingly esoteric. Tesco and Wal-Mart are
investing in environmental sustainability as a way of fighting off
those critics who are interested in social or local economic
sustainability.
Third, all these shades of moral grey are fuelling the rise of a new
business sector, for whom CSR is not a matter of compromise or being a
‘good neighbour’, because its central purpose is saving people or
planet.
These new ‘authentic’ businesses, including companies like Good Energy,
might have been non-governmental organizations a generation ago. Now
they become companies. Their arrival as a sector is a moral challenge
to more conventional corporations, and may shortly be a business
challenge as well.
This suggests that the old language of CSR – the stuff about being good
neighbours – has outlived its usefulness and needs to be put quietly to
sleep, for it implies that corporations do their stuff while
governments run the world, and that this division of responsibilities
still works.
The truth is that there are no neighbours left standing. Governments
are all but powerless to rescue the world. The world looks to the
corporates to tackle those issues that threaten us. That means a
different kind of CSR, and a much bigger stage for CSR professionals.
David Boyle is an associate of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Authenticity: brands, fakes, spin and the lust for real life (Harper Perennial)
