Meanderings on the subject of corporate ethics II

OK, so I asked Adam Garfunkel whether my fictional boardroom exists anywhere, and he was diplomatic in his response. His answer went something like, sure people are well motivated, even in boardrooms, but ultimately CSR initiatives have to make business sense. This, I suppose should be self evident, unless obviously you're a tambourine weilding idealist like myself.

Luckily he was pretty good at convincing me that at least a lot of the time CSR initiatives do make business sense. CSR, he explained, is about risk management. Increasingly, companies are conducting their business in public, improved means of communication making it easier to notice poor practice. Companies should avoid future scandal by looking long and hard at what they are doing, and putting it right if it offers any cause for concern.


Although this seemed to make fine sense (it always does at the time), I've been considering the extent to which the logic tied to market conditions. What if people don't care where their slacks are being manufactured? What if people who patronise your business are indifferent to ethics? What if people are distracted from ethical considerations by other imperatives? The current financial environment seems less conducive to ethical scrutiny than the boom which preceeded it. Businesses have also dropped the amount they're donating to charity.

I suppose the failsafe should be the law, which we imagine is creeping (very slowly) in the direction of making business acknowledge and seek to limit its impacts. In principle, a business would do well to make a gradual transition to more sustainable operations, rather than getting into some ruckus with a regulator. Unfortunately, law makers (at least in this country) seem to be doing very little to make things uncomfortable for unsustainable businesses, and this has also been compounded by the economy. It would be a great shame to see emergent business values like transparency and social responsibility going under before they've had a chance to make an impact.