Thanks to the wonders of Twitter hashtags (you can follow CO3tweets here), an article from the Social Innovation Generation website in Canada, came to our attention. Intrigued by something which starts with the notion that “CSR is dead”, we read on. The piece is interesting, insofar as its discussion of how the concepts of corporate social responsibility and their application to general business approach have evolved in recent times. You can read the full article here.
We would certainly agree with the assertion that philanthropy, such as making corporate donations to charity and volunteering schemes, is not central to business strategy. However, the piece seems to have confused the concepts of philanthropy and CSR, believing them to be the same. Philanthropy is “a good thing”, but it isn’t CSR. The piece goes on to discuss the adoption of a concept of “corporate social innovation” to describe where businesses are making a social impact, and describes this as “going beyond CSR”.
Unfortunately, we thought that this missed the point somewhat. The central tenet of CSR is about evaluating how your activities impact on not only society at large, but on the environment, and health and safety matters, for all stakeholders, and to ensure that these impacts are being properly managed and communicated in order to maximise opportunity and minimise risk. Quite aside from this, in a world already clouded with a lot of (often confusing) terminology (see also: greenwashing, sustainability, citizenship, ethics) we thought it was rather unhelpful to attempt to put another label on CSR. So many businesses struggle to fully grasp this important area anyway. Why make it more difficult?
I agree. Let’s not ovecomplicate it. I think CSR is about minimising your negative impacts on society, planet etc and at the same time striving to maximise the good that you do (whilst still making a profit if you are a business!).