Corporate Social Responsibility – Topic Goals
April 20, 2008 by NEIL MILLER | Filed under: General,Regarding Social Responsibility [1, 2, 4]
Hello, my name is Neil Miller and I would like to contribute to this EM discussion topic and will be attending the Environmental Management Workshop. I would like to move forward in the discussion and start off with the quote by Professor Peter Pruzan of Copenhagen Business School:
“I would argue that corporate social responsibility is a ‘mind-set’ with fundamentally different concepts of what success is, of who a company is accountable to and of what a company’s identity is. So it is only through a change in managers’ and employees’ ‘mind-sets’ that corporate social responsibility can go from being an organizational means to being an organizational ends or concern.”
The two topics I’d like to open up with are:
1) Is CSR just a means to maintain a company’s license to operate . . . or it is an end in itself?
2) Is CSR about doling out money to those who don’t like you?
Being critical on the subject, I believe that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is only looked at to improve the image of the company and to stimulate the stakeholders. This topic has been brought up a number of times through the history of government regulations. At first when specific states started to have pollution controls set upon them there was an outcry for a universal guideline which would apply to all companies in the United States to make the playing ground level. What they really were doing, was not trying to make the environment safer throughout the country. The companies just didn’t want to have to pay more money to improve the impact of their process when another company, probably a competitor, in another state didn’t have to change their process and had a larger profit margin. I do not believe that for a majority of companies that CSR is an end in itself. It appears to be done just to increase their profits and to retain a license to operate. They don’t completely eliminate hazards; they are only reduced to the legal limits.
Now, coming up through the 1990’s corporations accepted the cost of being environmentally friendly. They also saw how important it is to the public to see a company being “environmentally friendly” or “green”. There are conflicts of interest between a company trying to be “green” and one trying to skew their public perception. I’m not sure who is being referred to in “those who don’t like you” but I do think that companies play the governmental regulations to save the most money.
In text books there has been examples of companies buying “incentives” that were given to a company by our Federal Government as a “reward”. These give the company an exemption to exceeding some limits of pollution or some sort of waste. But, rather than fixing the process… companies have been buying government incentives by the handful. They have found that they can save money, in the end, by just buying these up rather than spending the money on fixing the problem. I’m not sure if this is an example of paying off “people who don’t like us” but I do think it is an example of companies paying people off in order to get out of doing something that is required, I believe this is bad CSR and it brings a cloudy image of the company who says they are working for the environment.
I would like to hear other interpretations of those two questions, presented above; I think they are very nice examples of how companies work toward corporate responsibility.