cover | story combating poverty and achieving other public goods. This “business case” for CSR is why it has held up so well during the financial and economic crisis of the last several years, as assessed by various independent sources. And this integration of CSR into the core business, and not unlimited campaign spending by fictional corporate persons granted “free speech rights” under the recent US Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, is the true meaning of corporate citizenship (which, properly understood and implemented, should be synonymous with CSR).
Chip Pitts, President of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and lectures on CSR and business/ human rights at Stanford Law School and Oxford University. He is adviser to the UN Global Compact and the Business and Human Rights Resource Center
impulse and philanthropy remains a (relatively minor) part of CSR. CSR is responding to major structural drivers and expectations of investors, employees, NGOs, global media, governments and society at large – stakeholders who will reward companies that “get it right” and punish those who get it wrong. As a result, CSR requires accountable and long-term sustainability: deeply integrated decision making that manages risk, seizes brand and employee recruitment and retention benefits and drives the “triple bottom line” (people and the planet as well as profits) throughout the core business, so that corporations are not part of the problems experienced today (social and environmental externalities like climate change, pollution,
human rights abuse, conflict and war), but instead are aligned with society and the expectations of all stakeholders to contribute to much-needed solutions. “Sustainability doesn’t refer merely to profit-making sustainability, although some business executives have unfortunately started to use it perversely in that narrow sense, and doesn’t refer merely to environmental sustainability, but includes long-term, future-oriented social sustainability as well – of the systems that support all of us. An exciting CSR trend is thus corporate deployment of their core competencies – strategic thinking, marketing, logistics, inventory control, etc. – in innovative public-private partnerships aimed at fighting HIV/AIDs, preserving scarce water resources,
Fisher: Who uses CSR? Pitts: CSR is relevant to businesses of all sorts and sizes, although global corporations subject to tremendous stakeholder scrutiny and pressure (by NGOs such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International, governments, the global media, international organizations and unions) have taken it up to a greater extent either as a result of various scandals or in order to achieve the various business benefits and proactively maintain their “social license to operate.” Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), though, have a tremendous economic impact and form part of the supply chains of the larger global corporations – tens of thousands in WalMart’s supply chain alone – and so can and must also implement CSR within their own spheres of influence. People are also trying to enhance attention to core CSR concepts even within the informal or black-market sector (again, as ironic as that may seem), given its persistent importance, especially in developing countries. Governments and international development and aid agencies are looking to forms of CSR in which companies join multi-stakeholder initiatives to help solve some of the world’s most significant problems. (This is the impetus behind the UN Global Compact, for example, or the International Labor Organization’s Better Work initiative). More broadly, CSR includes the increasingly convergent global norms of human rights and sustainable development such as the human rights, environmental and anti-corruption principles of the UN Global Compact – that form the framework for our continued peaceful existence on the planet, so it is incumbent on all of us to support greater CSR, whether as employees of corporations, or consumers needing to make more ethical (e.g. fair trade) purchasing decisions. May-July 2012 | Corporate Social Responsibility Today | 19