Is corporate social responsibility dead? Yes, says Harvard Business Review’s “Conversation Starter” blog. CSR will increasingly be seen as a public relations sham, the bloggers say.
Yes, says my colleague Stefan Stern, who recently predicted on this page that companies would abandon CSR in favour of “sustainability”.
No, says the European Commission, which commends companies that “go beyond minimum legal requirements to address societal needs” and has just spent three years and €1.4m ($2m) producing a 108-page report on CSR.
Many will regard the Commission’s endorsement as a sure sign that CSR’s time has past. Its report, written by academics from Insead and other European business schools, certainly contains a fair amount of nonsense, including the “finding” that managers become more socially responsible if they meditate. Doing yoga, according to the report, seems to produce a broadly similar result.
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