Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, is a deeply embedded concept in
Western society. It embodies the idea that corporations have an ethical
responsibility to society beyond financial return and beyond their
immediate shareholders. CSR organizations, contractors and reporters
have proliferated in recent decades as activist pressure around labor
rights, equity and environmental destruction including climate change
has ramped up.
This book examines international regimes working to monitor CSR, such as
The Global Compact and the EITI. We find the organizations rife with
conflicts of interest, lacking the means of verifying information
reported by corporations, and unable to enforce transgressions of the
largest corporations in any meaningful way. We then turn to the
burgeoning reporting industry that informs socially responsible
investment, using a test case of severe human rights violations leading
to death. In these cases, we find that while the incidents are reported,
they are obscured in the reporting system and have very tangential and
fleeting effects on CSR ratings. This underscores the overall lack of
accountability for corporations that violate their ethical commitments,
and the lack of credit for those who step up to them.
We close the book with a series of suggestions about how to reform the
CSR regime so that ethical investors and consumers can begin to have
confidence that the corporations they select to support will begin to
live up to their promises. Until there is transparency and objectivity,
CSR will remain a smoke-and-mirrors game of marketing over ethical
responsibility.
