In this post I have taken several comments out of my Environmental Communications Text, Chapter 20. To pass outside one’s comfort zone means to embrace the unknown and face the fear of failure. Doing the right thing is such a journey when you often have to move beyond the socially accepted ways of doing to do what is right to do. A simple ethical rule taught to business students is that the corporations maximize investor profits. This totally disregards all the externalities and other social-cultural ethics that may exist outside the corporation. It’s one of the reasons that corporations have often been the biggest contributor to environmental problems and seem so soulless. They drink the cool-aid that profit and money is everything. The good news is that a slow but noticeable transformation in corporate ethics is occurring where people and the environment are no longer ignored. The idea that only ‘shareholders’ are important is morphing into ‘stakeholders’ are crucial to why business occurs. In the previous post I introduced the Quad stack and the Triple Bottom line as basic essentials in addressing economic needs. There are business models appearing that take corporate social responsibility (CSR) to new levels (CSR is the act of incorporating environmental and social concerns into a company’s business).
In a prior post (Businesses making a difference) I introduced how some business models are working to be more socially and environmentally conscious such that business organizations, like individuals residing in a common region, build a shared concept of place through their actions, values, behaviors and strategies. “Market forces are pushing organizations to be sustainable, as well as how they might become agents for community transformation. Are they ‘walking the talk’? Or, just ‘washing themselves green’?” for market manipulation.
In the ideal, socially responsible corporations volunteer to behave ethically in all their business dealings, with ‘societal good’ a major goal of success. In a bottom-line, profit-based and highly competitive setting, the usual reality is that most businesses adopt societal good as a goal only under heavy external pressure. So, they act in environmentally responsible ways when it is good for their immediate competitive advantage and when they are being watched intently” Richard Jurin.
It is an illusion that any large business with short term financial perspectives will ever do anything for the common good unless they have a truly egalitarian agenda of delivering both short-term financial returns and long-term social benefits Stock markets, which originally began to allow investments for large trading projects (The original purpose of stock was to provide a way for entrepreneurs to sell fractional shares of ownership in companies for the purpose of raising capital to finance, launch and development of large community projects) have become an investment entity in themselves disconnected to their original purpose. Two things have to happen: shareholders must see the benefits of long-term strategizing for sustainability and then be willing to wait for long-term solutions benefitting all the shareholders affected by the investment. There is a myth that ethical consumers will drive the change – the power of the purse so to speak. Yet, most consumers are more concerned about price, taste or sell-by date than CSR. Rather than bitching about the corporate engines ruining the planet, maybe more pointed messaging about how we all are complicit in the actions that do the damage. As I have said several times in this blog, we are in the midst of a transition worldview in creating a new vision for change, but it involves all of us to create change, not waiting for a superman that will never arrive. The greatest thrust that will change the corporations is us, the people who use their products and services. While there are a few large businesses out there leading the charge for sustainable change, it is up to us to keep the rest of the corporate world honest. Since businesses are still beholden to investors, they will be hesitant to change when consumers and/or shareholders are not fully supportive of ‘green’ initiatives. Too often, businesses support these initiatives only to look more compassionate as a form of market advantage, not as a change in corporate ethics.
Another illusion is that the globalized economy will allow countries to pick and choose the ethical corporations that want to relocate to places with cheaper labor under the guide of improving health, environmental, and labor conditions. Companies moving to take advantage of cheap labor shows up that lack of ethics straight away. If you believe that they are doing to improve the economies of less developed countries, then do I have some great swampland in Florida to sell you. “Competitive pressure for foreign investment among developing countries has actually led to governments limiting their insistence on stringent compliance with human rights or environmental standards, in order to attract investment.”
Having just painted a negative picture of trying to change the business world and the lack of consumer support, there is a lot of good news to encourage us that change is really not that far away. Not all corporate and large business leaders, and stock market investors are profit-only minded sociopaths. The ethical consumer is growing faster every day. While it was once just the die-hard environmentalist that made ethical choices, people are realizing that their own purses joined with many others makes a massive statement of consumer choice. The simple fact that a giant like Walmart starting offering organic food and has a sizeable sustainability office shows just how much impact consumer choice has on their business mindset if not their ethics for now. When you look at businesses like Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget, Patagonia, or Interface, Inc., they show that business leaders working with environmental non-profit groups, with sustainability ethics, can maintain successful businesses and still be a force for good in the world. Several frameworks for how to use sustainable operations for businesses show an exciting picture of how a new style of capitalism can thrive in a post-modern world where sustainability is a prerequisite for human success. More about these frameworks in the next post.
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