A clever writer once classified corporate social responsibility in categories that ranged from mild to destructive: labelling them good management, borrowed virtue, pernicious CSR and delusional CSR. It would be an interesting exercise to put together a table of companies operating locally, even with foreign head offices, to see to which category they belong.

Despite bromides cast against the practice as a nuisance or worse, CSR endures. What attitude should responsible businesses adopt, was asked in a comment in a recent online journal. Detractors see it as an elaborate form of window-dressing that can divert companies from doing what really benefits society – investing in profitable projects, building value for shareholders, and giving people jobs. To impose a condition that a company must be ‘good’ beyond these virtues diverts its energies and treasure. Regulation-abiding companies are doing enough by obeying the law.

In another opinion CSR encourages the honest business’ endeavours. Another view has it that simply giving to charity reduces profits, but at least boosts social welfare.

A more pernicious kind of CSR increases profits but reduces social welfare. An example would be a company that withdraws from manufacturing in a low-wage market, gaining public relation kudos that helps its brand image and profitability, but in the meantime deprives workers of jobs. It would have been much better for the company to remain in that jurisdiction and ameliorate the working conditions of its workforce to set an example for the rest of the country’s employers to emulate! A case in point was the commendable practice by US firms, under conservative administrations, doing business in South Africa when apartheid was still practised and Mandela was in prison, to pay the legal costs of coloured people taken to court for flaunting the discriminatory provisions such as bathing in a whites only beach.

Pernicious CSR does exist, and it is this form of cynical spin that grates. A local case in point was the distribution of morally reprehensible products as a gimmick by a telecommunication company to underage persons at a state-funded local institution. But this odd practice does not overrule the fact that some CSR can be a force for good, and, residually, a benefit to companies that embrace it.

Colin Debono

GHAJNSIELEM