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CSR Change Agency

CSR Change Agency:

Making a Difference

Paper by Wayne Visser

In the face of unprecedented global challenges like financial market instability, persistent poverty and climate change, can individuals make a difference? This article looks at what motivates people to devote their time and energies to addressing social, environmental and ethical issues.

In particular, it shows how corporate sustainability and responsibility (CSR) can provide a powerful way to address what I called in a previous article for Ethical Corporation (‘Five corporate sustainability challenges that remain unmet’, EC 31, July 2004), the ‘existential gap’, i.e. the lack of a deeper sense of personal meaning and job satisfaction felt by many employees today.

A survey a few years ago by the London PR agency, Fish Can Sing, already hinted at the extent of the problem. They found that 66 per cent all 18-35 year-olds are unhappy at work, and the proportion rises to 83 per cent among 30-35 year-olds. According to their results, one in 15 has already quit the rat race and 45 per cent are seriously contemplating a career change.

They labelled this group of people ‘TIREDs’ – or Thirty-something Independent Radical Educated Drop-outs. In analysing this market segment, they discovered that these otherwise highly successful and motivated professionals were lacking something in their corporate life. This they called the ‘LDDR factor’ – they wanted Less Demand (i.e. less work-related stress, shorter working hours) and Deeper Reward (i.e. more job satisfaction, higher quality of life).

What‟s more, this existential crisis doesn’t appear to be confined either to the thirty-something age group, nor to the UK. According to the Worldwatch Institute, about a third of Americans report being ‘very happy, the same share as in 1957, when Americans were only half as wealthy. And in Japan, there is a word for ‘death from overwork’ (karoshi).

In fact, the industrialised world in general fares much worse than expected on some measures of wellbeing. For example, in the New Economics Foundation’s 2006 Happy Planet Index, which measures the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens, Italy is 66th, Germany 81st, Japan 95th, the UK comes 108th, Canada 111th, France 129th, United States 150th and Russia 172nd.

So what is going on here? Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning and a personal survivor of four Nazi concentration camps, suggests that our Western pursuit of economic growth may be to blame: ‘Consider today’s society,’ he says. ‘It gratifies and satisfies virtually every need – except for one, the need for meaning. This spreading meaning vacuum is especially evident in affluent industrial countries. People have the means for living, but not the meanings.’

Management guru, Charles Handy, puts it another way: ‘We seem to be saying that life is about economics, that money is the measure of things. My hunch is that most of us don’t believe any of this, and that it won’t work, but we are trapped in our own rhetoric and have, as yet, nothing else to offer, not even a different way to talk about it’ …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/paper_csr_change_agency_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] CSR Change Agency (paper)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/making-a-difference”]Page[/button] Making a Difference (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

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Visser, W. (2008) CSR Change Agency: Making a Difference, CSR International Paper Series, No. 1.

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Partnerships for Sustainable Development

Partnerships for Sustainable Development:

An Inclusive, Cross-Sector Approach

Paper by Ruth Findlay-Brooks, Wayne Visser and Thurstan Wright

Abstract

Cross-sector partnerships are increasingly being seen as a key development approach for the 21st Century, with many governments and international agencies viewing them as the most effective way to deal with complex and intractable development problems that have defeated single-sector interventions.

However, partnerships are not a straightforward option. Some see them as merely a “phase of policy experimentation” (Geddes, 2000, p797) – a short-term response to rapid global change. There can also be issues of accountability and power imbalance, when un-elected corporations and NGOs have influence in states where governments are weak or failing.  Even where they are the best solution, there can be real obstacles in both the development and management of partnerships which are too easily ignored.

This research draws on the University of Cambridge Programme for Industry’s (CPI’s) many years’ experience of partnership work – and in particular on the experiences of those running and participating in the Postgraduate Certificate in Cross-sector Partnership (PCCP) course.

Through exploring the experiences of these partnership practitioners, together with current thinking on the topic, the paper concludes that, if we are relying on partnerships to bring about structural change and long-term development impacts, then they need to be firmly tied into genuinely inclusive consultation processes, operate within accountability frameworks, be properly supported and evaluated, and where appropriate lead ultimately to policy change.

Introduction

Following the perceived shortcomings of the 1980s Structural Adjustment Programmes in developing countries, public/private partnerships or tri-sector partnerships are perceived as a more sustainable option, with donor agencies giving direct budget support to governments, along with the encouragement of partnership between development agencies, national governments and business. Tennyson asserts (2004, p3) that “only with comprehensive and widespread cross-sector collaboration can we ensure that sustainable development initiatives are imaginative, coherent and integrated enough to tackle the most intractable problems.”

The increasing popularity of partnership as a development solution, however, makes it all the more important to take a realistic view and to test the assumptions made about it. Two common pitfalls need to be avoided:

  1. that the act of setting up a partnership is seen in itself as having taken action on a problem, irrespective of its appropriateness or outcomes; and
  2. that cross-sector partnership is seen as a friendly, straightforward solution to development issues, resisting efforts to problematise, question or test its effectiveness.

Unless a more robust and realistic approach is taken to partnering as a development approach, then it risks suffering a backlash from unmet, unrealistic expectations which could result in its positive potential being lost. For this reason, we have endeavoured to take a critical approach to the findings of this study and look at ways in which partnership can, if it is to offer a successful way of aiding inclusive development, be supported through planning and policy …

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Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Page[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk”]Link[/button] Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (website)

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Findlay-Brooks, R., Visser, W. & Wright, T. (2007) Partnerships for Sustainable Development: An Inclusive, Cross-Sector Approach Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership Paper Series, No. 4.

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Policy Dialogue on Sustainability

Policy Dialogue on Sustainability:

A New Model – The Case of the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change

Paper by Wayne Visser and Margaret Adey

Abstract

Dialogue is often loosely touted as an approach to tackling sustainability challenges and resolving sustainability dilemmas or conflicts, especially through the process of stakeholder dialogue. However, the literature is more sparse on the role of companies in pro-active, pro-sustainability policy dialogue, as opposed to the practice of corporate lobbying against proposed sustainability regulation. This paper seeks to address this gap by analysing a particularly innovative case study, The Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change. The paper follows the structure of introducing the concept of dialogue, reviewing the literature on sustainability dialogue and describing and evaluating the case study.

Dialogue

Ellinor and Gerard (1998) describe dialogue as a foundational communication process that assists in creating environments of high trust and openness, with reflective and generative capacities.

The word dialogue stems from the Greek roots ‘dia’ (i.e. through) and ‘logos’ (i.e. word or meaning). Although relatively new to modern-day organisational practices, dialogue can be traced to ancient Greece, as described in The Dialogues of Plato (1898) and to forms of communication used by Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. Aspects of dialogue can also be found within Quaker spiritual and business practice, in counselling models such as those of Carl Rogers, as part of certain Eastern meditation practices, and in the philosophical works of Martin Buber (Gerard & Teurfs, 1996).

There are numerous approaches to dialogue. For example, Slotte and Hämäläinen (2003) contrast the Bohmian dialogue, as developed by physicist David Bohm (1996) and championed by Senge (1990) and Isaacs (1999), with Socratic dialogue, inspired by Socrates but developed as specific approach by the philosopher and educationalist Leonard Nelson (1965). The Center for Creative Learning (1996) identify a broader range of perspectives on dialogue, based on the work of Chris Argyris (around organisational learning), David Bohm (around developing shared meaning), David Johnson and Roger Johnson (around cooperation and productivity), Jack Mezirow (around the conditions for rational discourse), and Paulo Freire (around educational transformation).

Among its more modern organisational applications, dialogue can form an integral part of continuous learning, diversity management, conflict exploration, problem solving, leadership development, team-building, organizational planning and culture change (Ellinor and Gerard 1998). Some of these applications adopt a very specific approach and set of techniques, such as the Decision Structuring dialogue method, which uses an agenda or topic as a starting point, focusing both on content (i.e. the issue under discussion) and process (i.e. the way the issue is discussed) and following a series of prescribed steps led by a facilitator (Slotte and Hämäläinen 2003).

Dialogue and sustainability

It would appear, however, that little or none of these perspectives and approaches on dialogue have been applied directly by sustainability scholars. Rather, dialogue most often appears in the sustainability literature in a looser sense as “stakeholder dialogue”, incorporating business ethics (Garcia-Marza, 2005), corporate social responsibility (Jonker & Nijhof, 2006), corporate accountability (Rasche & Esser, 2006) and environmental management (Perret, 2003) …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/paper_policy_sustainability_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Policy Dialogue on Sustainability (paper)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Page[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk”]Link[/button] Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. & Adey, M. (2007) Policy Dialogue on Sustainability: A New Model – The Case of the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership Paper Series, No. 3.

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Sustainability Innovation

Sustainability Innovation:

Mapping the Territory

Paper by Michael Blowfield, Wayne Visser & Finbarr Livesey

Abstract

Innovation is a well-studied area of business behaviour, and is increasingly seen as a crucial element in the private sector’s responses to the challenges of sustainability.  However, what exactly is meant by innovation in a sustainability context is not very clear.  This paper makes the case for a more reflexive and structured approach to understanding innovation for sustainability in order to understand what it shares in common with innovation more broadly, where it is unique, what the gaps are in our current knowledge, and what might be the consequence of these gaps.  In building this understanding, we draw on theoretical and empirical studies, normative and non-normative approaches, and descriptive and instrumental analyses.  We employ a framework that distinguishes between the enablers of sustainability innovation (SI), the different types of agent that influence innovation for sustainability and the intra-organisational processes that take place (especially within companies).

Introduction

Increasingly, business is referred to as an essential element in meeting the challenges of sustainability: not only to amend its behaviour so as to reduce negative impacts, but also to use its strengths to overcome barriers more effectively than other sectors of society are able to do.  Innovation is one such area of perceived business strength, and now business and government are encouraged to think in terms of sustainability innovation to meet such demands as green technology, energy efficiency and social enterprise.  It is often claimed that the challenges of sustainability require different approaches to (and perhaps new models of) business.  Yet there has been little rigorous analysis of if and how sustainability requires new ways of thinking about innovation.  The main purpose of this  paper is to examine what we know about sustainability as the determinant of a genuinely different form of innovation, and to set out a framework for a more reflexive and structured approach to sustainability innovation in future.

To understand if sustainability innovation (SI) differs from other models of innovation, let us first consider what innovation means.  When discussing whether innovation (in its broad sense) is qualitatively different from innovation applied for sustainability, it is important to have a clear sense of the boundary of the terms being used. One of the broadest definitions of innovation states that it is “… the successful exploitation of new ideas” (DTI 2003). Unsurprisingly, exploitation in this context has become synonymous with introduction to market and so this definition is one that presupposes a market-based assessment for the outcomes of the innovation process. The bias in most discussions of innovation towards a commercial, for-profit setting with a market mechanism for price signalling and managing distribution should be acknowledged. Equally, this may be where innovation for sustainability distinguishes itself from innovation more broadly.

In terms of market led or company-based innovation there has been an acknowledged shift in recent years towards more dynamic and networked models of innovation (Chesbrough 2003) away from old linear models. This is well described by Rothwell in his five generations of innovation models (Rothwell quoted in Tidd, Bessant et al. 2001).

None of the models of innovation, either descriptive or analytical, presuppose the set of goals which the process is trying to achieve. In that sense, there is no immediate difference between SI and innovation in its broadest sense. However, it is the context for sustainability that implies biases towards different types of innovation …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/paper_sustainability_innovation_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Sustainability Innovation (paper)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/making-a-difference”]Page[/button] Making a Difference (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk”]Link[/button] Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (website)

Cite this article

Blowfield, M., Visser, W. & Livesey, F. (2007) Sustainability Innovation: Mapping the Territory, Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership Paper Series, No. 2.

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Corporate Sustainability and the Individual

Corporate Sustainability and the Individual:

A Literature Review

Paper by Wayne Visser

Abstract

This paper introduces the literature and theories of corporate sustainability and how these have been applied at the level of the individual. It begins by defining corporate sustainability, reviewing the concept origins, demonstrating that it is an essentially contested concept (overlapping with related terms like corporate social responsibility, business ethics and corporate citizenship) and exploring some of the underlying principles. The paper then gives an overview of academic research that has been conducted on corporate sustainability generally and on the role of the individual in corporate sustainability in particular. In term of the latter, five themes are explored: the importance of values congruence of managers and employees with organisational values; the instrumental association between individual concern, knowledge and commitment and corporate social and environmental responsiveness; narrative accounts by sustainability managers of corporate “greening”; the role of sustainability managers as champions, entrepreneurs or agents of change in their organisations; and the application of psychology to understand individual responses to sustainability issues. Finally, conclusions are drawn.

Defining “Corporate Sustainability”

A Synthesis Definition

In this paper, I point out that corporate sustainability is a contested concept, which to a greater or lesser extent (depending on the author) draws from and overlaps with notions of sustainable development, corporate citizenship, corporate (social) responsibility, environmental management, business ethics and stakeholder management.

I have been guided in my own synthesis definition of corporate sustainability by the practitioner perspective that I often encountered (and adopted) in my work as a consultant in the field and which my research participants generally embraced, namely that we should focus on the essence of commonality among these terms, rather than (as viewed by them) the pedantic differences.

Perhaps less acknowledged in practice, but clear from the literature and my philosophical position, corporate sustainability is in no way an objective, scientific or neutral concept, but rather a normative construct, which always contains a set of implicit or explicit values.

Hence, for the purposes of this paper, I define corporate sustainability as a values-laden umbrella concept, which refers to the way in which the interface between business, society and the environment is managed.

Concept Origins

Corporate sustainability evolved as a derivation of the concept of sustainable development, which was first introduced by the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) and defined as “development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs” (43). The ideas behind sustainable development are much older, traceable at least back to the preservation and conservation movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but the Brundtland definition quoted above marks the concept’s entry into the modern lexicon …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/paper_sustainability_individual_lit_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] Corporate Sustainability & the Individual (paper)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/making-a-difference”]Page[/button] Making a Difference (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk”]Link[/button] Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2007) Corporate Sustainability and the Individual: A Literature Review, Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership Paper Series, No. 1.

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