CSR or revolution?

CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is the set of theories and practices increasingly produced in the last twenty years to enable companies to manage their role in the society. The public arena and the markets, nowadays networked in a whole tangled conversation, as the Cluetrain Manifesto warned us more than ten years ago (http://www.cluetrain.com/) are asking more to companies and what most of them have been answering is CSR policies.

These policies should allow the company to find its own decent place inside communities by running social and community programs, involving employees in voluntary activities, sponsoring educational initiatives, modifying their internal procedures and practices in compliance with legal or ethical requirements. Now, everybody understands the the true issue for companies is how to keep on attracting market shares that have become volatile, connected and much more aware of what is going on in the real world. Nothing is secret nowadays. A company bad performance or an unethical behavior is easily caught and brought up in the Internet public justice tribunal. None is anymore safe, at any level, even if managers are still earning fortunes.

Of course, the hope is that a crisis event would be strongly mitigated by an irony reputation, just the one that CSR is called to provide. Even if CSR is effectively working in providing pupils scholarships, minimizing environmental impact, sponsoring sport competitions and cultural events, the question is not if CSR can be trustworthy for consumers and citizens' wellbeing but, above all, if it is ethical or politically correct to accept money and services in exchange for the usual exploitation and disruption companies are bringing about, especially when they are more and more moving away from western countries to the south of the world.

Doesn't exist the risk that while we get the "social" smiling face of the company, someone else is actually getting its (our) wastes and the impoverishment of environment, health, ecetc.?

Moreover, in some evident cases CSR and charities are the means by which powerful organisations and their CEO clean up their bad conscience, so allowing themselves to keep on with their business (think about the well known Soros Foundation, or check out Mazzotta's documentary OIL http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfmfuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50469345

The suggestion is that we should be not only mistrustful but openly hostile to whatever corporate means prevent us from clearly denouncing the ruin that the neoliberal economy and the big corporations are causing, no matter how friendly a new means as CSR is, and the concrete improvements it could actually provide or trigger within disadvantaged communities.

Of course, we need to recognize that the issue can't have the same weight for a young university researcher in Boston and for a workman's son in Ukraine, where getting a company support can really make the difference i the labor market (and actually it works a little bit everywhere).

What about CSR practitioners? Do they think they're helping the world get better or they look at CSR just as one of the awful boring office tasks they have to accomplish?

Personally, I like pretty practical approaches: can we keep on demonizing big companies while dreaming of a bloodless revolution or a natural catastrophe that should cleanse up our world from the misery of capitalism? If it was possible to get rid of all of them, could we get by without companies?

If a new social sensitivity and the Internet non hierarchical culture are finally penetrating the company world making it more human and democratic, this is an historical achievement that could raise up new unpredictable scenarios and even if companies' primary goal is still money, the good news is that it is no longer the only one. Acting the fiction becomes reality. Our global society can just be improved by a networked collective effort towards democratization and social justice at all levels, included corporate level: managers must be not only responsible in front of the public but reachable, as much as politicians should be. I personally don't dream of a society made just of public institutions or NGOs: the true goal is to open and democratize companies and CSR could just work as a trojan horse.