The Corporate Responsibility Movement

Five Years of Global Corporate Responsibility Analysis from Lifeworth, 2001-2005

Jem Bendell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351279581
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Corporate social responsibility is now an established agenda for large companies, with a new profession emerging that engages in the social and environmental contribution of business. How has this agenda emerged over time? What were the key events and actors? How has this new "movement" of committed individuals been taking shape around the globe? Insights into these questions come from a review of the first half of first decade of the 21st century. The Corporate Responsibility Movement compiles Lifeworth's highly praised Annual Reviews of Corporate Responsibility from 2001 to 2005.It is introduced with a new overview by the lead author of those reviews, Dr Jem Bendell, in a piece that examines the trajectory of a new social movement in and around business. At a time of searching questions about the future of finance, Dr Bendell argues that a new concept of "capital democracy" is emerging from within the community of people working towards corporate responsibility, which could be mainstreamed as a socially and environmentally enhanced system of economy. He calls on professionals, researchers and policy-makers to embrace an ambitious agenda for corporate responsibility and develop greater insight into acting together as a movement for change.This book is an essential resource for business libraries, recording, analysing and contextualising some of the key events, issues and trends during this historic period in the development of the corporation.

Acknowledgements

I thank John Stuart for commissioning me in 2001 to write the World Reviews for the Journal of Corporate Citizenship and agreeing for them to be published as Annual Reviews by Lifeworth. I am grateful for the contributions of my co-authors Désirée Abrahams, Tim Concannon, Mark Bendell, Kate Ives, Kate Kearins, John Manoochehri, Rupesh Shah, Shilpa Shah, Wayne Visser and Mark Young. Tim Concannon and John Paul Sena designed the Annual Reviews on a very tight budget, with Dean Bargh’s support. Thankfully, Paul Gibbons, Hannah Jones, Jeremy Moon, David Murphy, Jules Peck, Maggie Royston and Mark Young arranged crucial financial support from Nike, Future Considerations, New Academy of Business, University of Nottingham ICCSR and WWF. Malcolm McIntosh, Sandra Waddock and David Birch provided editorial guidance as editors of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, while Dean Bargh swiftly tidied up my ramblings and oversights. Thanks also to Sandy Lin for helping me prepare the thematic index. If you would like to sponsor future issues of the Annual Reviews, please get in touch via www.lifeworth.com.

Introduction

The emergence of the corporate responsibility movement

Jem Bendell

Involved for a change

Rolling onto my back, I lay my head on a rucksack, staring into the night sky. The tarmac still pushes up through my sleeping bag, but somehow it feels more comfortable this way. I think of the few times I have slept out in the open, in fields after parties, or on beaches while travelling—times when I could revel in the sense of floating through the immensity of space, secured on the edge of a cosmic plan, or comic fluke, called planet Earth. But tonight I can’t drift away with thoughts of the infinite expanse of space. Police helicopters hover above, their cones of light traversing the car park like manic stilts. Dreaming is not permitted. It’s the G8 Summit in Genoa, 2001. I stretch my neck. My face feels sticky with the residue of vinegar I was told would help me during tear-gas attacks. Are we being searched for or spotlighted, I wonder? If they shine their lights on us for long enough, perhaps they’ll discover what they’re looking for? Perhaps we’re all here to discover what we’re looking for—something different, something possible? I can’t sleep and turn to Rik, a guy I met on the streets during the day. ‘D’you want to hear my poem?’ he asks. ‘Yeah, why not . . .?’

Possessed by possessions
Lord and Master of all we owe
Belonging to belongings
It’s a disaster, I know

Chained to the mundane
Our reference frame is physical
Every day the same old same
Nothing metaphysical

And if God’s not dead
He must be mad
Or blind
Or deaf and dumb
Or bad
Still smarting over Christ, perhaps
The way the people have been had

But in our defence
I’d like to say
We nearly chose the proper path
But lost the plot along the way
You’ve got to laugh

It’s not our fault
It’s just the toys we made
Made such a lovely noise
And girls and boys
Are high and dry
Time to bid
All this
Goodbye.

Rik Strong’s The Sermon, which he recited to me as we ‘bedded’ down in a car park during the demonstrations at the G8 Summit in Genoa, July 2001, captured the emotion that drove many of us to act in what was sometimes called an ‘anti-globalisation’ movement by the mass media, and came to be known by many activists as the global justice movement (Korten 2006). It was a feeling of something going wrong. The modern Western world didn’t relate to how we felt inside. Publicly people didn’t seem to care for each other, yet we knew that deep down they must do—surely? For us there had to be more to us than working, shopping and looking out for Number One.

I was protesting in Genoa as part of The Brighton Collective—an eclectic gathering from all walks of life in Brighton, England, with various political affiliations or none. It was one of many grassroots initiatives aimed at engaging the general public about the global economic causes of the various social and environmental issues faced locally, and abroad, and helping them to campaign around meetings of international organisations.

The same year I was dodging both aggressive protesters and police, I started writing a regular review of corporate responsibility issues and initiatives, five years of which are compiled in this volume. I had been working as a corporate responsibility consultant and researcher, which involved advising on matters such as how to conduct voluntary assessments of the social and environmental performance of a company’s supply chain. Terms such as ‘sustainable business’, ‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘corporate citizenship’ had become popular for describing the integration of social, environmental and economic considerations into the decision-making structures and processes of business. A contemporary view of corporate responsibility had emerged as not only involving diligent compliance with national law but also aspiring to meet international standards and the expectations of society. More managers understood the importance of engaging stakeholders to more effectively manage potential corporate risks, build trust within society, stimulate innovation, and enable new business models or reach new markets. Some already understood that, ultimately, being responsible involves innovating products and business processes to provide solutions to social and environmental challenges.

Jumping between barricades and boardrooms might seem schizophrenic. Or perhaps just a manifestation of an ‘opposable mind’ capable of holding different world-views at the same time (Martin 2007). But I didn’t see such a difference: I was experimenting with ways to play a role in helping transform economic life to make it more supportive of . . . well . . . all life. On the one hand, work on corporate responsibility could help alleviate certain problems, and grassroots mobilisation could help maintain attention on the bigger picture. Some others I met at the time had a similar view. For instance, a number of the protesters I met at the first Global Day of Action during the G7 in Birmingham, in 1998, now work on corporate responsibility or responsible finance.

I hoped there would be a coming-together of the different fields of corporate responsibility work with a more fundamental understanding of the limits of current processes of corporate and financial globalisation. The goal is that by being citizens not only at a ballot box, but also at work and in the high street, private enterprise can deliver public ends more effectively than relying on the sum of the narrow self-interests of consumers, investors or employees. As that is a comprehensive agenda, many sections in the World Reviews dealt with trade regulation, global governance and the need to reform global finance to make it more supportive of socially and environmentally responsible enterprise. In the thematic index that we have prepared to help you navigate this volume, these sections appear under the topics of ‘Political involvement’ and ‘Responsible investment’. This explicitly normative approach to analysis is not always how academics or business writers approach things—which, in fact, is why I kept going at it. Because, as I will argue in this introduction, corporate responsibility practitioners urgently require support in understanding how their work is evolving and can achieve greater social change while benefiting their own organisation. I will argue that they are part of a social movement that has been largely overlooked by social movements theorists, organisation theorists and specialists in corporate responsibility research. I argue there is a role for intellectuals to help inform and therefore co-create critical practice. I map out some implications for research, practice and policy that come from applying a social movement lens to what is occurring today with the contemporary corporation and its systems of financing.

A key shift that was consolidated during the five years overviewed in this volume is the change in the way many business people relate to the social and environmental performance of their companies. In the not-so-distant past, there were few executives who would accept responsibility for the social and environmental impacts of their companies beyond legal compliance, or for the impacts of their suppliers or customers, or accept that those affected by their value chain should have some say over the social and environmental performance of that chain. This changed for many industries in many parts of the world. Over half of the Fortune Global 500 transnational corporations produce a separate corporate responsibility report annually (Williams 2004), and most have senior executives with responsibility for social and environmental performance (Economist 2005).

Many commentators describe these changes as a response to various social movements and the protests they have directed at companies (Murphy and Bendell 1997; Bendell 2000; Starr 2000). However, any view of the contemporary rise of corporate responsibility as solely a professional response to external social movements is challenged by the discourse of the professionals themselves. Increasingly they speak of themselves as part of a ‘corporate responsibility movement’. The Vice President of Corporate Responsibility at the clothing and sportswear firm Nike often uses this very term and speaks like a social activist when describing how her company is ‘blurring the edges of what corporate social responsibility is. . . looking at business models as a force for massive social change’ (Jones 2007). The founder of the Global Reporting Initiative, Allen White, explains his latest work is intended to ‘build . . . a vanguard for change. . . to form the beginnings of a movement that will commit in fairly concrete ways to change. And we want that movement to involve business. . .’ (White 2007). ‘The corporate social responsibility movement is picking up steam. . .,’ reported the CFO magazine (Teach 2005), while the former UN Secretary-General said, ‘there is a pressing need to sustain the momentum of the corporate responsibility movement’ (Annan 2006). At the time of going to print, the phrase ‘corporate responsibility movement’ produced over 4,000 hits on Google, the phrase ‘corporate social responsibility movement’ 6,000 hits and ‘CSR movement’ 14,000. The ‘global justice movement’, a widely used term by social movements analysts today, produced 44,000 hits. This means that, on the English-language Internet, corporate responsibility is half as prominent a movement as the global justice movement, so should warrant at least some attention in those terms—as a movement.

‘Social movement’ is defined in Encyclopaedia Britannica (2003) as a ‘loosely organized but sustained campaign in support of a social goal, typically either the implementation or the prevention of a change in society’s structure or values’. I will assert that, by using a social movement lens to look at corporate responsibility work, important issues come into sharper focus, such as the goals pursued and the identities involved. I argue that during the five years reviewed in this book, we witnessed the emergence of the corporate responsibility movement as a loosely organised but sustained effort by individuals both inside and outside the private sector, who seek to use or change specific corporate practices, whole corporations, or entire systems of corporate activity, in accordance with their personal commitment to public goals and the expectations of wider society. Moreover, I argue this movement is working in diverse ways on a common agenda to democratise economic activity and conclude by offering a conceptual framework for an overarching goal of ‘capital democracy’ to help inform both movement adherents and analysts.

We end the chronicling of events and trends in corporate responsibility at 2005, as that year marked ten years of the contemporary phase of corporate responsibility. As the prolific Toby Webb (2005: 1) wrote, in Ethical Corporation magazine, ‘the ten-year mark for modern corporate responsibility seems an opportune moment to reflect on how far the movement has progressed’. It compelled us at Lifeworth to offer a synopsis of the scale of the challenge confronting corporate responsibility practitioners, in the Lifeworth Annual Review of 2005, called Serving Systemic Transformations. We called for more work on the systems around the corporation, particularly global finance. We echoed the analysis that led me to the streets of Birmingham and Genoa, and which I explained in my last book, Terms for Endearment:

[Since the end of the Cold War we have witnessed] the unveiling of a form of hypercapitalism where trillions of dollars are switched around the world in a day, where companies that have never turned a profit are worth billions, and where the future of corporations is decided by a handful of investment managers who are primarily interested in short-term share price. The collective opinion of these investment managers is the compass from which the courses of corporations are set, and in turn the course of governments seeking the favour of investors. Hypercapitalism is spiralling out of control, becoming disconnected from the people living in its midst (Bendell 2000: 240).

As a credit crisis gripped financial markets, this situation was critiqued as ‘super-capitalism’ by Robert Reich (2007). I would not exactly call it ‘super’, but the increasingly mainstream critique of global finance and calls for fundamental reform during 2008 echoed the calls of corporate responsibility practitioners, since the Enron collapse six years earlier, for a more coherent approach to fostering economic democracy. That is an economy that supports people’s self-actualisation, rather than subjugating them to the insatiable logic of compound interest (Kelly 2001). John Elkington and Mark Lee (2006) from the leading corporate responsibility consultancy SustainAbility argue, ‘in its current incarnation, the movement is simply not equal to global challenges like poverty and climate change’. Reflecting on the future of the corporate responsibility movement, the editor of Business Ethics magazine, Marjorie Kelly, wrote that ‘if we wish to stop being beside the point . . . we would do well to focus on democratizing structures of power. That means imagining, and then creating, economic democracy’ (Kelly 2002). In concluding I will imagine what an economic democracy agenda could mean as the goal of a corporate responsibility movement that is awakening to its shared identity and common purpose.

The context in 2001

Over the past decade theories in both organisational studies and social movements have increasingly focused on the broader economic, social and political contexts within which organisations and movements emerge (McAdam and Scott 2005). The reviews in this volume similarly chronicle a widening of focus by practitioners towards the contexts around individual companies, such as regulations, consumer awareness and investment practices. Because context matters, and it is important to recall some economic and political, as well as social and environmental, contexts surrounding the actors and organisations discussed in this volume. It was an awareness of this context that motivated many of the people working on corporate responsibility to do so, and it is the nature and scale of challenges found in this context that provide a yardstick with which to judge the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the contributors
• Endnotes
• Thematic index