1.1 Introduction: The Need for Social Responsibility—A Consequence of the One-Sidedness of the Globally Influential Humans and Organizations
The present book on Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance—Policy and Practice is an answer to the twenty-first Century Challenge, which results from the experience that the global politicians tend to arrange global conferences, e.g. on the very crucial topics such as sustainability, climate change, poverty and poverty elimination, while they poorly link these topics with the corporate social responsibility, i.e. responsibility for one’s influences on society, and related corporate governance. The global political bodies made a crucial progress after the year 2000 by passing the ISO 26000 on social responsibility (ISO 2010) and related documents by UNO (e.g. Global Compact, established in 2000),1 European Union (2011), and some world-top corporate associations (e.g. WBCSD).2 The Google websites on social responsibility and corporate social responsibility are very full—they contain many millions of contributions.
But these global political bodies and these authors were, and are, unable to make ISO 26000 obligatory for humans and their organizations, especially the most influential—big corporations—and the most numerous—SMEs (i.e. small and medium-sized enterprises), as well as individuals and governments. It seems obvious that a number of reasons on the part of businesses caused this lack of promotion of social responsibility. These reasons might include the (powerful) corporations’:
- Oversight of several benefits for them that are briefed in ISO 26000 (ISO 2010) and in EU’s document supportive of social responsibility (will full right for economic reasons);
- Preference for their short-term benefits over the long-term ones;
- Preference for their narrow-minded criteria of benefit over the broader ones, such as taking in account shareholders only rather than all stakeholders and society at large;
- Imagination that they, i.e. their bosses, are no parts of the entire society and cannot be victims of anybody’s one-sided rather than systemic behavior;
- Subordination of national governments as well as the international and supra-national bodies such as EU, to corporations monopolizing the global economy rather than working on a free and equal-footed market place;
- Forgetting that these attributes of their business style tend to cause crucial detriments to humankind and consequently to corporation, such as crucial cost resulting from strikes, poor health and therefore costly big need for medical care rather than prevention of health troubles, disequilibrium in nature, destroyed natural environment, end of natural resources, war-caused destruction (all these cause higher taxes and enemies); etc.
Therefore, the current dilemma of humankind reads: either the end of humankind as a species on the planet Earth or social responsibility as a basic attribute of the corporate governance.
1.2 Humankind’s Need for a Model of Life After the Neoliberal Monopolies
Data are clear (see e.g.3 Mulej et al. 2013; Mulej and Dyck, ed. 2014 (four books); Mulej et al., ed. 2016 (Mulej and Hrast 2016; Mulej and Čagran 2016; Mulej et al. 2016); Lebe and Mulej, guest ed. 2014; Mulej et al., guest ed. 2014; Mulej et al., guest ed. 2014): 80% of the global business is under control of less than 750 out of 30 million investigated organizations. This is happening under the label of free market, but it is killing the free market as a place of equal-footed economy. Besides, this neoliberal capitalism is killing the liberal capitalism in which the invisible hand directs businesses and consumers into long-term relations of mutual trust and reliability. In addition, the neoliberal capitalism no longer faces the dilemma ‘either guns or butter’, but uses the extremely extensive production of weapons to assure butter, but only to the single percent of the richest persons and their few employees, while causing more than ten current wars and more than one hundred million displaced persons. Those wars, of cause, are far away from the countries that are the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and produce and sell the predominant quantities of weapons globally (USA alone sell one third of the entire huge production of weapons).
The conclusion 1: the neoliberal capitalism is not capitalism in its original definition (free market, permanent innovation, consideration of the triple concept—freedom, equality, brotherhood, make-it-do and do-without), but a new kind of feudal and slave-owning society under a new label.
The conclusion 2: the neoliberal capitalism is at the end of its blind alley and humankind needs to replace it—in a third world war or without it (war is a much more dangerous and costly solution)—by a socially responsible society.
1.3 Social Responsibility—The Alternative Model of Life After the Neoliberal Monopolies
On the global level, humankind discovered the alternative to the dangerous neoliberal monopolies and their permanent crises, including world wars. Under the umbrella of UNO and ISO humankind called the alternative—the social responsibility. The name is somehow misleading; it should better be “humans’ and their organizations’ responsibility toward the society, i.e. humans/humankind and the natural environment”. Social responsibility is supposed to reach beyond law, but no way to replace law. It should change law to attain unconditional support to socially responsible behavior of humans as persons and as members, especially the influential members of organizations, be them enterprises, families, NGOs, countries and their parts and supranational unions, such as EU. This applies also to unions that have legally become countries over time, such as USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, India, China, South Africa, Japan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Australia, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, etc.
The three critical concepts, summarized briefly and clearly in ISO 26000, namely are:
- Responsibility for one’s influences over society, i.e. humans and other nature;
- Interdependence;
- Holistic approach.
The three principles oppose monopolies. Namely, monopolies have always in human history tended to generate irresponsibility:
- Bosses had/have no one to control them, including adaptation of law to their interests.
- Subordinates had/have no rights except the right of irresponsibility, e.g. by limitation of their effort to the bosses’ orders without any own initiative, except the one opposing the bosses.
Monopolies have always in human history tended to generate the ethic of dependence and independence rather than the only natural consequence of specialization per natural attributes and professions, i.e. interdependence and ethics of interdependence:
- Bosses felt/feel their independence from their subordinates and other nature; this generated their feeling of their right of irresponsibility, because they tended to find their power a source of special rig...