Reaching OUT
SPECIAL COVER SECTION
CSR: Doing ordinary things extraordinarily well Dr. Caterina Lornezo-Molo Assistant Professor, School of Communication
Faced with criticism for their contribution to the problem of obesity, a popular children’s network launched a program through a lobbying initiative to reinstate recess periods—and the exercise that comes with them—in schools. The campaign garnered considerable public support, and also benefited the network. A company that produces milk, fruit juice, and smoothies through environmentally sustainable and socially responsible processes that consider effects on both its internal and external audiences, launched a corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaign that encouraged buyers to purchase healthy food, while automatically initiating the donation of money to grow a tree in India.
CSR defined
Virtually everyone agrees that good corporate citizenship is essential and that the most popular measure or gauge of this has been corporate social responsibility. It is popular among the Fortune 500, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international clubs; and it has become particularly significant in the aftermath of a market economy that flourished and thrived in the 20th century, bringing with it a string of social attacks directly related to its negative face. Simply put, CSR is firms behaving responsibly; and to be perceived to be doing so, corporations engage in acts of doing good usually outside the regular scope of a company’s core business interests (i.e. philanthropic and ‘do-gooder’ activities), which are consciously crafted to gain positive reviews, publicity, and effects from stakeholders. Everyone has certain responsibilities; while we might not often realize it, we all have a lot of them on our plate. We all wear many hats, and with each hat come a host of responsibilities. But what happens when we add even more hats to our collection of regular hats? We would definitely not have enough time to prepare ourselves to wear all
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UNIVERSITAS November 2009
of them; and most might just rot in our closets. In a similar manner, if we spread ourselves too thinly, we would probably become quite mediocre and even irresponsible with the main roles we have to play. What will happen to a corporation if it focuses on doing charity and philanthropy to attain competitive advantage? What about those acts of a corporation that are directly related to the core business of an organization (i.e., employee relations, transparency, attention to the effects of commercial messages on society)?
True CSR assumes that practitioners are ethical. This requires the business leader and other members of the organization to be well versed in business ethics even before engaging in front-stage CSR.
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Front-stage and back-stage CSR
To quote from Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, “He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.” As it is generally practiced, the primary problem with CSR is that it is often contrary to the core business of a corporation. This is the premise of my latest paper entitled “Why Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Remains a Myth: The Case of the Philippines”, published in the latest issue of Asian Business & Management (ABM), an academic business and management journal also concerned with understanding social issues. CSR in its market organizational environment is understood as the governance of externalities by firms. Thus, a corporation may do considerable public service work and charity (front-stage CSR)