Observations on corporate social responsibility
It's a pretty remarkable story that provokes a "no comment" response from the head of policy at the Institute of Directors. But the usually fluent and voluble Ruth Lea did not feel able to add to the official statement, put out by the IoD this week, concerning the non-appearance of a joint IoD/Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report into corporate social responsibility or CSR.
The project had begun with the best of intentions. The champion of free-market, laissez-faire business, and the prominent left-leaning think-tank, were to combine forces in an analysis of current business attitudes towards CSR. Five hundred IoD members from a range of businesses were polled by NOP, and the results studied and reported on by the IPPR.
But after several months' collaboration, including some limited (and agreed) revision and editing of the research findings, relations between the two bodies broke down at the last minute. The IoD, which paid NOP's bill and allowed its members to be polled, instructed the IPPR not to publish the report.
The two institutions appear to agree on very few details of this story. The IoD claims that the report is effectively its private property, and insists that its own analysis of the data will be published "in due course". At the IPPR, meanwhile, there is frustration that an important and original piece of work has been suppressed on the eve of publication. Perhaps we shall just have to mark this down as the latest example of a failed public/private partnership.
The pity of it is that CSR is urgently in need of this kind of thorough, critical analysis. The IPPR had sensibly designed the research to be carried out with mainstream business people, and not with superstar chief executives and stock-market heroes. Any old CEO with a good PR adviser can make the right noises about the environment or global poverty. The question is: what do real managers actually think and do in practice?
The findings of the report remain under wraps - or, to be more precise, in cardboard boxes at the IPPR. But what has emerged is the large gap between the warm words of certain business figures, and the lack of serious commitment to being socially responsible on the ground. This confirms the views of Julia Cleverdon, head of the charity Business in the Community, the leading CSR advocate, who argues that businesses need to engage with a far more intricate set of responsibilities - in the workplace, in the market place and in the environment - than they usually realise.
In business, and management theories generally, it's the acronyms you have to watch out for. What starts out as quite a good idea gets distorted, translated into a set of initials, and then turned into a business fad. "Total quality management" wasn't quite as stupid as it sounds. But once it had become TQM, it was doomed. Businesses taking their wider responsibilities much more seriously is clearly good news. Dress this up as CSR, and the idea soon starts lurching towards disaster.
Enron famously had a flourishing CSR department, and made huge donations to charity all over the world. Billionaire business people talk movingly of "putting something back", and get the cheque-book out with a sob in their voice and a tear in their eye. What CSR so often fails to address is this very basic point: it's how you make your money that counts, not what you do with it once you have made it. Someone ought to tell the members of the IoD.
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