How much corporate social responsibility (CSR) is enough? How much CSR reporting is enough?

These questions start from a mistaken notion of what the responsibility of corporations is.

Former Shell director Sir Geoffrey Chandler once said of “corporate social responsibility”: “I know of no phrase which has done more damage to constructive thought or caused greater confusion. It has encouraged the belief that a company’s responsibility to society lies in voluntary philanthropic add-ons, rather than the application of principle to all its activities.” (1)

By Chandler’s light, “how much CSR” questions make no sense.

(read more…)

Not long ago, I reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

I’ll have more to say about this unforgettable novel about social change in the countryside at one of the great inflection points in British history. But these two quotations, I thought, merited attention by themselves:

On one point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his career; he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.

George Eliot, Middlemarch [1872] (New York: Bantam Classics, 1985), p. 133.

(read more…)