Corporate Social Policy Responsibility
















What sayest thou O Troppodillians?

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5 Responses to Corporate Social Policy Responsibility

  1. paul frijters says:

    totally agreed. I once suggested to a conference of 200 self-professed corporate do-gooders that they came up with a quality label for companies who paid a reasonable amount of taxation. I also suggested they funded think-tanks that would specialise in tax morale and how to get taxes out of platforms (think uber and airbnb) as well the too-big-to-tax companies.

    Deathly silence. I believe someone chocked on their vegan G&T and almost dropped their frequent flier badge that had a Nelson Mandela logo.

    5% sure, but nothing that would cost them their good name with the other ‘ahem’ do-gooders.

    Still, I do think its the way to go to argue that true do-gooding means supporting the nation state and lining up against the corporate interests that undermine it. There is a shitload of good to be done there and companies might turn out to be rather good at it.

  2. David Walker says:


    Sadly, I suspect this clause would rob the idea of most of its power. In my experience, spreading the belief that a preferred policy is in the public interest is the first step that most corporations take internally when commencing lobbying. It’s so automatic that it can be hard for many people to even see. They all believe that their preferred action is in the public interest. Their continued employment requires them to do so.

    It remains as difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends upon their not understanding it.

  3. Nicholas Gruen says:

    Yes, agreed.

    I have it in mind some standard and independent process, and not one controlled by or even influenced by the corporation. And yes, that’s a hard thing to get happening, I agree.

  4. Vern Hughes says:

    CSR as a phenomen is inseparable from the class of consultants who derive a livelihood from it. Or, to put it another way, CSR wouldn’t exist without this class of consultants – it is nurtured by them, promoted by them, and milked by them.

    In the late 1990s when a cluster of ‘social’ responses emerged to neo-liberalism, including social venture philanthropy and impact investment, social entrepreneurship, social innovation and CSR, the interests of this consulting class were entwined with those of several other interests (NGOs, philanthropic foundations, and, in amongst the others, community associations that genuinely sought to address predicaments of disadvantage they were immersed in).

    In the twenty years since then, these responses have now been captured, almost exclusively, by the financial and career interests of these practitioners and their aupicing organisations (the community groups have fallen by the wayside). The ‘social’ has been steadily narrowed to mean little more than the career and financial interests of the managerial class in nominally ‘social’ organisations. The CSR practitioners have successfully hitched their interests to those of the corporate world in a classic example of what they call a ‘win-win’: the corporates have been given a ‘social’ rationale for their gouging of consumers, and the CSR practitioners have got permanent rather than ‘gig’ work.

    Qantas is a marvellous demonstration of the outcome. The ‘social’ for Qantas now means prosecution of LGBTQ rights, including the active bullying of tennis legend Margaret Court for being outside the ‘social’ consensus. This works for Qantas staff, while allowing CEO Alan Joyce to wallow in a $6.565m salary, and allows CSR practitioners to join him in salaried work. Both can virtue-signal to their heart’s content.

    • paul frijters says:

      interesting! The capture of “ethical challenges” is extremely common and lucrative to the captors. One might call it the Business of Purity.

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