Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) should be a pretty self explanatory term; Corporations involved in initiatives that benefit society in general and the uplift of underprivileged citizens in particular.

But what is CSR? Are corporations obliged to divert their assets towards taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, or it it just something good they could consider, without any legal or moral precedence?

Do companies only get involved in social development because it helps brand recognition and boosts sales?

There any many such interesting perspectives that a lot of us have about corporations getting involved in CSR work.

There are many, for example, who feel that social development is only an obligation of the government, and it is their right as tax paying citizens, and only feel that corporations only get involved in anything because of a greedy incentive to make even more money than they might be at any given point in time.

There are others who feel that there’s nothing wrong with companies making money or profits from projects that also help society as a by-product - why should CSR inherently mean "free" activities?

There are even others who think corporations can often have an even greater role to play in social uplift compared to donors and governments. Their take is that governments and donor-assisted projects would take too long compared to how quickly a corporation can choose to impact an area or start an initiative. Their take is that corporations have money, money = power. Perhaps even the power to bring about change.

A majority of the people isolate banks and corporations/businesses as having the largest amount of discretionary funds and influence and can enforce CSR initiatives more effectively. Based on that reasoning, the fact that these corporations have copious amounts of money at their disposal automatically obliges them to take the lead and give back to the people.

Finally, I’ve also seen people think that CSR in Pakistan is somewhat related to existing social problems which seem to have entrenched themselves within our social setup. For example, they feel that corporations are engaged in "CSR" when they are participating in anti-corruption business measures, have to account for the law and order situation and political turmoil the country might be facing. Compliance of ethical issues and international standards of the code of conduct seems to be part of "CSR" activiites.

Before we can start to unravel the more complex relationship of successful corporations towards societies, we need to understand what people in large feel CSR is.

What do you think? Have you heard any interesting perspective from your friends, family or from anyone around on how or why corporations should treat citizens in a certain way, or regarding the types of activities they should be involved in? Let me know in the comments!

Share This

We may not realize it yet, but having an open, democratic discussion on the Corporate Social Responsibilities of organizations in Pakistan is a need of the hour - Let me tell you why.

As with Green & White, Osama and I were working since July 2007 (almost a year ago!) to look at how corporations were positioning themselves as a member of society. It started just from curiousity, and off and on we would talk to MNCs, NGOs, consumers and other people involved in social development issues about their thought process behind the activities occurring in the field.

I was surprised to see how many different definitions of CSR existed in the people we talked to - everyone seemed to differ on what CSR was; why was it necessary; what their role was and how they affected everyone else in the ecosystem.

We met people who denied that their corporations had any role to play to help their society. "Isn’t the investment we’re making in the economy or the jobs we’re creating enough? Why should people hold any expectations from us beyond this?"

We met people who thought that social responsibility was the same as charity - and because of this their companies were missing out on the type of activities that would truly make a difference.

We also saw a lot of very interesting and innovative social leadership activities occuring in Pakistan - the types of things that can make us all proud of being Green - from all over society, sometimes from young people with dreams to change the world.

Read more…

Share This

Finally, we’re live! As I said on Green & White, I wanted to start a formal discussion on CSR and social responsibility in general ever since last year when some of our posts gathered a lot of interest in the area.

But we can never do these things alone.

For one thing, we need people who are passionate about these topics and can actually break apart these ideas to present actionable results. Fortunately, over the past year I’ve found interested people like Ramla and Waqas.

But its also been a hard time finding people who are experts in the field to get involved in the discussion and add their thoughts, especially when the medium is a blog! A year ago, I had a pretty hard time convincing people that blogs could be based on professional discussion… but as Green & White has grown, the appreciation among companies and high-level people of the strength of the medium has grown too. So fortunately, now we have found an excellent panel to represent this community as well (we’ll introduce them in time.)

Finally, these types of community activities cannot start without a certain leap of faith in the need to build such communities, and I’m very glad that we’ve found supporters who wanted such an open-directional discussion to take place.

So the blog is set, the thinking caps are on, and the final piece thats left is YOU - lets get together and discuss social responsibility candidly and thoroughly just the same way we discuss innovation and modern-management on Green & White.

What do you say - do you like what we’re setting out to do here?

Share This