Corporate Responsibility, simply put, is doing the right thing for your stakeholders. Stakeholders include anyone from a company’s actual investors and stockholders, to the employees and communities they work in. Corporate Responsibility generally refers to initiatives such as fair and healthy working conditions, decreasing pollution, and investing in communities in the long term.
When I started thinking about Corporate Responsibility for individual companies, I initally had mixed feelings about certain conglomerates’ supposed good intentions. As a comparison, I’ll tell a story of my Habitat Trip last Spring to Birmingham, Alabama. Although the group from my school went through a Campus Ministry program,and intended to spend the week in solidarity and reflect on our experiences, our counterparts from the other side of the divider were not in the same mindset. The group from Canada had brought one of their mom’s along, who cooked fabulous meals for them while we ate PB&Js. They went to the mall one night and came home with a bunch of new clothes, and spent time on their laptops and cell phones, even though most of us Americans had turned ourselves off for the week.
Besides being fun for Canada/America jokes, at the beginning of the trip, we were kind of perturbed. How can you come to do SERVICE without giving anything else but your time, hard work, and commitment to the cause? That’s of course, when it clicked. They did not need to be going to the same measures to live simply as we were. The fact that they decided to drive down and volunteer their time was truly enough.
That’s how I feel about some companies’ response to Corporate Social Responsibility. It may not be entirely out of the good of their hearts,and perhaps just an elaborate marketing scheme to convince customers that they’re good people. But in the end, it’s helping others! (I of course hope that it is out of good intentions, but one cannot always be sure.)
An article I read in class the other day tried to expand upon this notion. Craig Calhoun, in The Imperative to Reduce Suffering, explains that it is different to provide care to those who suffer, just because they are suffering, than to provide care to effectively accomplish a goal, such as promoting peace or saving lives. There is certainly a difference in these two ways to confront problems in the world, but most larger NGOs, and all Corporate Responsibility plans, are leaning towards this second option. As described in the last post, Non-profit organizations are morphing in to a more professional sphere, because investors don’t just want organizations to try to help and do their best, but to systematically make a difference.
This definitely alienates some people who do service for the means to serve, which is an important aspect of many peoples’ lives. There should still be smaller programs in place to do so, but I do think that the governments and larger NGOs of the world should be held responsible for the outcome of their large donations and programs. It seems acceptable to use small expenditures to create programs for service (and of course volunteer time is free of cost) but larger programs should have accountability measures, much like the Corporate Responsibility plans do in corporations.