Archive for January 2008
Social Corporate Responsability, or the New Order of the World
And the CSR battle has begun. Corporations are struggling with new social realities – CSR, the Corporate Social Responsibility – intended for companies to “do well by doing good”. I’ve recently been through the entire The Economist special report on CSR, Jan 17th 2008, and I was quite impressed.
Google, for instance, hired a veteran, a prominent figure in the business and NGO world, Larry Brilliant, to lead the company’s policy on social responsibility and
But as a former NGO activist, I wonder: Is this good, something to be put forward and supported, or this actually is a shift in responsibility, very cleverly disguised, from governments and/or local authorities to money-making organisations?
Or is this in fact ‘dust in the eyes’ from corporations to draw the attention away from their other misdeeds? As a journalist from The Economist put it, “an ever expanding army of NGOs stands ready to do a battle with multinational companies at the slightest sign of misbehaviour”.
People may call me a cynical when faced with such positive changes, but I believe in the old saying,”the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
Let’s wait and see!
