Peter F Smith
The Increasing Use of Tools in CSR Analysis
Peter F Smith
Managing Director csrevaluator
Abstract
CSR is about to celebrate a decade of exposure to the global business community. In that decade the perceptions of what is CSR, how it relates to on-going business viability and what role will it play as we move further into the 21st century have changed considerably. This is not surprising as individuals who have expounded the virtues of CSR derive from a wide variety of backgrounds (sometimes with their own specific agendas) and be those individuals responsible for CSR in-house or as out-house consultants it has taken their activities some time to reach the radar of the Boardroom.
The issue that now exercises senior executives of many companies is their inability to appropriately align CSR, Corporate Governance, business risk management processes and purely corporate philanthropic activities. CSR as originally conceived was an attempt by western business school academics to articulate how companies would need to conduct themselves, their activities and corporate reporting in the 21st century. The basis was financial stability aligned to appropriate environmental footprint aligned with socially responsible behaviour towards your people, your neighbours and society in general.
However, as CSR expanded into a global subject so local and regional variations started to occur, and to take account of these variations there developed a CSR culture of attempting to divorce CSR activities from mainstream business processes. In some instances this led to some organisations and consultancies articulating a world where financial and non-financial reporting became separate activities, as if the two could exist alongside one another in some form of parallel universe.
Alongside the debate of the role of CSR within a company it soon became clear that CSR practitioners were making increasing use (almost becoming reliant upon) a burgeoning number of CSR best practice guidance manuals, self-appointed pseudo-codes of practice, indexation organisations, and self-assessment tools whose outputs could be manipulated virtually at will. In all cases these documents and tools came from a similar perspective, they were specifically derived to promote the organisation that compiled them. This is particularly true of the various indexation organisations such as FTSE4Good, Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Business in the Community and companies were deliberately choosing to join an Index, or use a particular tool, that made them look good rather than address their real CSR challenges.
Click here to download the full paper.
(C) 2014 - All rights reserved