Corporate sustainability (and related concepts like ESG and materiality) have been reduced to discussions around financial value. This makes these concepts “ethically blind”. We are in need of a resurgence of business ethics, otherwise the endless discussions of the “business case” for sustainability will turn out to be the error at the heart of true […]
Andreas Rasche
Corporate Criminal Liability in Germany – An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Siemens, Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank … and now Airbus. What is wrong with German companies? It seems that German firms are disproportionally exposed to corporate irresponsibility. Of course, this is more of a subjective assessment than a statistical fact, and to be fair Airbus SE is a European company. Corporate irresponsibility appears in all jurisdictions, for all […]
Malcolm McIntosh – Tribute to an Academic Entrepreneur
Malcolm McIntosh passed away on 7 June 2017. We lost, as Sandra Waddock recently remarked, an intellectual shaman – someone who cared deeply about the state of the world and who was thinking so wonderfully enthusiastic, “wild” and unconventional about corporate responsibility and sustainability.
CSR is Dead. Long Live CSR
We – Andreas Rasche, Mette Morsing, and Jeremy Moon – just edited an international textbook entitled Corporate Social Responsibility: Strategy, Communication, Governance (Cambridge University Press). When talking to people about the book, one common response was: “Why didn’t you just call it Corporate Sustainability? After all, this term is used by everybody these days…” In 2014, […]
UN Global Compact Silently Expels More than 2,300 Non-Business Participants
The UN Global Compact continues to “clean up” its participant base. The initiative reported to have 5,332 non-business participants (e.g., global and local NGOs and associations) in its October Bulletin, while its November Bulletin lists 2,983 active non-business participants. Hence, the Compact seems to have expelled more than 2,300 non-business participants for failure to submit the required “Communication on Engagement” report in the beginning of November. This is almost 43% of all non-business participants.
The Ecosystem of Shared Value – Unoriginal, But Still Likely to Make an Impact
The October 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an article by Mark Kramer and Marc Pfitzer called “The Ecosystem of Shared Value.” Positioned as a follow-up to Porter and Kramer’s very successful essay on “Creating Shared Value” (CSV), the authors suggest that to “advance shared value efforts […] businesses must foster and participate […]
UN Global Compact Expels More Participants than New Participants Join
In October 2015, the UN Global Compact, the UN’s flagship initiative for corporate responsibility and sustainability, has expelled 130 firms for failure to report on implementation progress. During this month only 116 new businesses joined the initiative. This is third month in 2015 that the initiative had to expel more participants than new participants joined (after January and September).