A New Decade, and New Challenges in CSR?

One of the more interesting arguments voiced by critics of the corporate social responsibility movement is that many of industry's opponents can never be entirely satisfied, and that companies that clearly care about their images and take pains to communicate their commitment to CSR are simply painting targets on their backs.

It's an argument I've never found particularly convincing: it assumes that the only possible motivation for CSR is cosmetic; that good reputation is defined by the ability to avoid controversy; that all controversies are created equal; and that members of the public are too stupid to tell the difference between a well-meaning but flawed organization and an organization with no interest in the social impacts of its activities. I don't think any of those assumptions is accurate.

Still, I'd be interested to learn how the public relations folks at Shell, a company that takes CSR very seriously, feel about the recent attention of Amnesty International, which has launched what the Financial Times describes as "its biggest ever campaign against a single company" over Shell's alleged role in human right abuses in Nigeria (where the company has had some issues in the past.)

According to the FT: "There are signs from Amnesty and beyond that the heat is being turned up again and that companies must brace themselves for greater scrutiny. 'Things are getting more pressured,' admits the top corporate responsibility executive for one U.K. company with global operations, who declines to be named.'"

I'm not sufficiently familiar with the Shell story to know whether Amnesty or the company is right--I'm not sure it's possible to know without spending several months on the ground in Nigeria--but there are a couple of lessons that public relations professionals should take from this story, and that's the first one: if you're going to defend the company's activities, you need to spend some time in the operational realm, and see for yourself what's going on, rather than taking the word of line managers and communicating via some sort of lawyer-devised companyspeak.

The social media age means that consumers expect a more personal form of communication, and PR people should be able to answer a simple, basic question: "What's it really like out there?"

The second (as I've written in the past) is that companies don't get to choose whether the issues raised by groups like Amnesty, or the expectations they reflect, are "legitimate." I once--many years ago--heard a Shell executive explain that those who believed the company should intervene with the government of Nigeria to prevent human rights abuses were being "unreasonable" and that their attacks on the company were therefore "illegitimate."

That's no longer a call the company gets to make. If the company believes in the benefits of a good reputation, and if it believes a stakeholder group has the power and influence to make its life more difficult, then the views of that stakeholder group have to be taken seriously.

And finally, the argument that Shell's Andrew Vickers appears to be making in the FT article--that human rights standards are different in places like Nigeria ("we're not operating in the North Sea")--is no longer viable: companies will and should be held to the same standards globally; if something is clearly unethical or unacceptable in New York or London or Amsterdam, it's unethical and unacceptable in the developing world too.