New Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility

This is a chapter about how to organise sustainability in the twenty-first century. Multiple sources from within and outside academia support the central argument that sustainability does indeed matter and that business is part of the problem and part of the solution. Following decades of talking about sustainability, we have hardly made real progress. Furthermore, the quest for implementation has only recently appeared on the organisational radar. What has actually been implemented under the umbrella of sustainability is limited in its design and scope. The past decade has shown that these approaches and actions have not done what they were supposed to do. They do not reflect the urgency of the rapidly expanding group of issues we have assembled under the term sustainability. Central to the on-going debate regarding sustainability and responsibility is that something obvious is missing. The missing link is how we organise sustainability, not only as an organisational issue but as a collaborative challenge. The argument is built upon two elements. The first is that no organisation can achieve sustainability on its own. New and intense collaboration between organisations is needed in order to shape the process of transformation. This first element is called “an organisational ecology for sustainability”. The second element is that this new way of working will require transitions—fundamental change in a technological, organisational and social sense. This line of reasoning is developed from the past to the present. This leads to a compact overview of where we have come from and what we stand for now. It also provides a perspective of the work that needs to be accomplished in the years to come: work on new forms of collaboration, on leadership and on transition thinking. As a whole, this contribution can be read as an urgent call to develop a new generation of thinking around the theme of sustainability.

Against the backdrop of the financial crisis which triggered the occupy movement, income inequality, and unsustainable levels of public and private debt elicit concerns regarding the health of the economic system. These issues, which are increasingly gaining public awareness, trigger over-arching questions which reach to the fundamental roots of the model of capitalism. Although capitalism can be considered to have served society well in helping to reduce global poverty and expand access to healthcare and education, the distribution of the wealth which is created by capitalism undoubtedly concurrently generates, as a spin-off, costs for society. In particular, some authors suggest that the growing gap in income inequality and public debt, which have both widened and currently reached an historic high in some countries, negatively affects the economy and thereby society. Consistent with the contemporary interest in addressing social problems and welfare in a new more inclusive approach to capitalism based on stakeholder theory, key to advancing our knowledge in this area would be the identification of the conditions under which public debt and income inequality are growing. A salient question in this debate is the (negative) role that a widening income gap plays in influencing and increasing public debt. This research gap is the missing link upon which the chapter focuses. To address these themes, the aim of the chapter is to present the theoretical and empirical arguments for causality between growing income inequality and increasing public debt within capitalist economies. However, in establishing this causal link and identifying income inequality as a contributing factor to public debt growth, the chapter does not focus on evaluating the role of public debt in society per se. Instead this theme is consigned to the scope of separate research in this field.

This chapter offers a blueprint for the integration of financial, environmental, social, and governance reporting, an emerging practice that has profoundly changed the way organisations develop strategic plans, approach decision-making, measure success, and manage risks in the twenty-first century. Overlooked in the act to prepare a traditional balance sheet are the 80 % of a company’s assets and liabilities, including social and environmental, that conveniently fall outside the scope of modern accounting. In this chapter, we ask the question, why have we continued to take an “unbalanced” approach? We envision a future when a balanced sheet, renamed the value statement, captures the financial, social, and environmental conditions of a firm over multiple periods of time and this information is further supported by a statement of change in stakeholder’s equity (rather than stockholders’ equity). By quantifying assets, liabilities, and performance related to all forms of capital, businesses worldwide are leveraging Integrated Bottom Line (the analysis and disclosure of financial, social, and environmental assets and liabilities to internal, and external stakeholders of a firm) to achieve long-term value creation, innovation, and competitive advantage. IBL goes beyond an accounting practice to become a catalyst for sustainable management solutions, risk management, and stakeholder engagement. To help demonstrate this transformation of performance measurement, the information within this chapter reviews the evolution of integrated reporting, the need for more involvement from accountants to go beyond a myopic focus on the bottom line to enabling shared value through evidence based management, and a review of enabling organisations. The chapter concludes with a call to action for business schools and business organisations to work together at the intersection of integrated reporting to develop solutions for tomorrow’s measurement problems.

The Africa of today is very different from the Africa of yesterday. The Africa of today is seeing Africans taking charge of their own destinies, ushering in democratic governments and undertaking macro-economic reforms that are facilitating the socio-economic and political transformation of the continent. It is a far cry from the Africa labelled by The Economist (The Economist 2000, pp. 15, 20–22) as a “hopeless continent.” A new narrative about Africa is been written, it is about “a rising Africa.” This rising Africa according to The Economist (The Economist. http://www.economist.com/node/21541015, 2011) over the past decade has six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries. In eight of the past 10 years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slow-down, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expected Africa to grow by 6 % in 2011 and 2012 and by 5.7 % in 2013.Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can enhance the sustainability of this growth. This it can do by addressing the social and environmental impacts of various companies’ actions and by engaging in socially responsible behaviour, transfers of technology and technical expertise, as well as contributing to human development—a sustainable model. For CSR to be able to achieve this, it must move away from the archaic and paternalistic practice where CSR is mostly regarded as “philanthropy” by most companies operating in Africa whiles their main focus is on Return on Investment (ROI). CSR must move to a more sustainable model which offers mutual benefit to the respective companies operating in the region and to Africans. This is so because the numerous companies that operate in Africa cannot continuously extract huge profits from Africa’s resources without giving back in the form of investing in the long-term sustainable development of these countries. Not only is the old way of doing business archaic, it is also not sustainable. A mutually beneficial sustainable model can be achieved when companies operating in Africa begin to work with the various African governments on a win-win, CSR model which puts Africa’s long-term sustainable development needs at the core without compromising the needs of the companies as well. This is the missing link in the practice of CSR as far as Africa is concerned. This paradigm shift as reasoned in this chapter is indeed a new perspective and a sustainable solution of practising CSR in Africa.