This article, “Social Concerns are Crunched Off the Agenda”, has been sitting on tab in my browser for months, bad blogger that I have been.
I don’t have a lot to say this. But from the opening line, the author suggests that our financial crisis is creating huge problems for “corporate social responsibility”. The problem is that, like Economist’s of the past, the author assumes CSR is some voluntary nicety that companies partake in when business is going well. This goes against efforts, including my own humble ones, to draw attention to the obligatory elements of this what I prefer to call “corporate responsibility”. This is very much at the core of the financial crisis and I would say that the fact that many CSR professionals haven’t discussed pay and incentive issues or discussions on how to treat customers (examples from the article) highlights the problems of CSR rhetoric more than proof that social concerns are going away.
